TrulyB
An online costume jewellery shop, mostly snowflake necklaces and lockets.
TrulyB is a WordPress and WooCommerce shop selling costume jewellery — snowflake necklaces mostly, alongside lockets, pendants and a few rose and pawprint pieces, most of it priced around £10. Stock is bought in and held, photographed, listed and posted out.
It existed to find out whether one person could run a paid-acquisition retail business end to end: sourcing, product photography, the storefront, the ads and the fulfilment. For a while it could. Three to five years ago it peaked at roughly £20k a month in sales, with about half of that going straight back out as ad spend.
That is the whole lesson, really. The model worked at £1k of ad spend and it worked at £10k, but the margin on a £10 necklace was never wide enough to survive customer acquisition getting any dearer, and break-even is not a business. It has been dormant since. The shop is still live and an order turns up now and then, but I have not bought an ad, added stock or written a line of copy in years, and there is only a few hundred pounds of inventory left. Keeping it up costs nothing, so it stays up.