Start-Up Of The Week: CoolGeekAustralia - A Young Entrepreneur's ...

CoolGeek is an eCommerce venture launched recently by Tram Tran and her partner which currently caters to the needs of spectacle frames and lenses for the Australian populace. What is unique about this venture is that Tram is a full time student in Sydney who is just 21 years of age and has concurrently created ?CoolGeek to bolster her passive income. Their policy for selecting products to sell here is quite simple - only sell the coolest, geekiest, highest quality stuff that they would like to wear themselves.

Tram is also an entrepreneur at heart and believes in running her online empire from her laptop and phone. ?Another unique feature at CoolGeek is that should you, not like the product for any reason, on return within a stipulated period you will be refunded 110% of the price that you paid for it - I bet that is an offer that you would not have encountered anywhere else. They sell most of their frame + standard lens at $99 AUD. ?I have been following CoolGeek since its inception and noticed that they have just launched a very cool new feature where you can "Try the frame" on different avatars or if you have a webcam then you can snap yourself and actually see what you look like in the frame that you are looking to buy.

Tram is also the blogger behind StartYoungFinishFirst where she professes the idea of how one should start young in life as an entrepreneur and how that poses an advantage to anyone. All of her posts are well researched but my favorite happens to be this. Tram was good enough to take some time out of her hectic schedule and talk to us about her work. Heck, as a bonus to our readers she has created a coupon on her website; use coupon code "ejunkie" to avail yourself a $20 AUD flat discount on the site. Check out Tram's responses below:

Tram, could you please introduce yourself to our readers.?

I?m Tram Tran, 21 years old, university student and co-founder of Cool Geek Specs at www.coolgeekaustralia.com

What was the inspiration behind starting Cool Geek?

I have terrible eyesights but hate wearing just one dull expensive pair of glasses. On my holiday to Vietnam, when going shopping, I found out that owning multiple pairs of stylish, cool frames for a fraction of the cost is possible. The key is to get on good terms with suppliers and have a large network of connections. This helps enormously in securing the most stylish styles for the cheapest price.

I thought to myself. "There must be others wanting to own several pairs of stylish, cool prescription glasses but are afraid of the enormous cost." I told my 2 other friends and they all agree that we should give this a shot. Cool Geek was born like that.

You can read more of how Cool Geek was born in my blog here:

(http://www.startyoungfinishfirst.com/holiday-shopping-and-start-up.html)

What were some of the difficulties that you faced from the point that you conceived the idea to having Cool Geek up and running?

Being a full time student who runs business has its up and down. Time management and self- discipline are the two main tasks I feel I have to master to have Cool Geek up and running. We have no background in designing, so in conjunction of hiring designers to help us build the site, we also have to learn basic designing. We believe that it?s good to know a little bit of everything

What is the criteria that you use to determine whether a frame gets sold on Cool Geek or not?

Van Anh, our head designer hand-picks our frames. We only choose the designs that we ourselves would wear, which means the frames are of the highest quality, the coolest style and of course in the softest price range.

Since you are a start-up how are you promoting the concept and the website? ?

Being a start-up, we mostly use free to low-cost marketing methods such as words of mouth (this can be very powerful), Facebook marketing ( Please like our page at www.facebook.com/coolgeekaus) , Google adwords, offline marketing.

We are also planning a new marketing campaign where we give out FREE prescription lenses. To promote this campaign, we ask for the help of Australia?s top bloggers as well as distributing flyers around university campuses ( because our target customers are university students who love cool, quirky frames but don?t have the budget to afford expensive designer frames).

We also include a $10 gift card in every order we send out, to keep our customers coming back.

We also give out 5% of our profit to help sick kids. We want to make sure the process of giving back is made easy. Our customers simply purchase a cool pair of specs and some where in Vietnam, a kid is helped.

What other people do you look up to for inspiration? This could be other entrepreneurs, artists writers etc.

I look up to a lot of entrepreneurs for inspiration. Their success inspires me. Recently I watched an episode of Shark Tank, one of the entrepreneurs is only 16 but has been generating a profit of one million dollars from her jewelry line.

I thought to myself, if a 16 year old can do it, I can do it

If you could have one superhero (or magical) power, what would ?it be and why?

Funny you should ask, I just had my 21st birthday party not long ago and the theme is Super Heroes. If I could have one superhero power, I would want the ability to heal the sick. That is partly the reasons why I?m so passionate about entrepreneurialism. It opens several opportunities to generate money, make money work for us (instead of us working for money). While money can?t buy your health, it can be used as resource for medical research. By doing business and making money, I can give back and indirectly fulfill my super hero duty.

What are your future plans for Cool Geek? Do you have plans to launch more eCommerce websites?

There are several future plans for Cool Geek. We plan to pursue the customization path as we feel this is the way to differentiate our products to the rest of the competition. In initial stage, we would like to include an engraving service, in which we help our customers can express their individuality by engraving on the inside of the frame. It can be a symbol, an image or a meaningful quote. The ultimate goal is to build Cool Geek into a site where our customers can design their own pair of frame. Our vision is to let customers have full control of how their glasses will look like. Customers will be able to add their own touches from the shapes of the lenses, colors of the bridge, material of the frames instead of having someone else design their specs.

Of course, we have plans to launch more eCommerce websites, but we don?t want to be ahead of our words, so hopefully in the near future, we?ll report to eJunkie all the bits and pieces of our new site(s).

As a young entrepreneur what tips and advice would you like to give to our readers on how to succeed online?

I blog regularly about the power of starting young at my blog (www.startyoungfinishfirst.com). As clich? as it sounds, I find this quote true:? Success is a ladder that can not be climbed with your hands in your pocket.? And one more thing, Start as young as you can, if you fail, you still have time to start again.




Thank you for taking the time for this interview, we wish you and Cool Geek the very best for the future.?

You can read more about CoolGeek at:

Website
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