wegg® showcase: Wendy Shen, President and CEO, FLOMO/Nygala

I also started a business to make my parents proud. My parents manufacture novelty stationery. My father is called the King of the Pencil Case. They were selling pencil cases to a lot of places in Japan and Europe, but they did not sell to the US. I felt like I should try to sell their products in the US.

Right now, having a small business or a start-up is glamorous, but at that time, not at all. It was difficult. I was an MBA student. My friends from the MBA program went to work for big corporations. I was the only one in the class that wanted to start a business. So I wrote a thesis on how to start a business in the United States, and I put my thesis into practice.

There were a lot of challenges. First was being a woman. Second, I was very young. If you start a business and you’re a young girl, only 22 or 23 years old, people don’t think you have an established business. Third, I’m a minority and I speak with an accent. A woman from a foreign country, a minority, and I speak with an accent—they thought I just got here and my business was very small. They minimized me right away. Plus, exporting is still more of a men’s business. While we work with a lot of female buyers, higher levels in the industry are dominated by men.

The first thing I did when starting my business was expand internationally because payment terms are better. A lot of international customers are willing to pre-pay instead of getting an open payment term. Here in the US, you need 60-, 90-, 180-day payment terms. A lot of corporations in the US pay in 120 days.

Register your trademark in the country you’re exporting to prior to going international. Once, I was trying to export into a country and they said FLOMO is being registered as a trademark. I said, “What? That’s our logo!”

Decide if you want to sell on e-commerce or in brick and mortar stores. Because I sell directly to a lot of brick-and-mortar retail chains, I usually visit the local market. I’m thinking to sell to Peru, so I talked to somebody I know in Lima and the first thing they suggested was that I come to see the market. I totally agree. Don’t just email. Understand the country you are targeting. At one time, Argentina was easier to export to, but it has closed its borders because of high duties and their political situation. Same thing with Brazil and Venezuela. They closed their doors.

Tariffs play a big role in international business. For example, if you re-export a product from China to Mexico, your customer is going to think that an excessive duty means the price will be high. Price is still an issue for certain parts of the world. Understanding the country also means knowing its regulatory compliance guidelines, such as testing regulations. Europe has a variety of compliance issues we must follow. Find local distributors to partner with. I’m talking about a good importer and retailer who will support you. They can tell you a lot about the local business environment.

Then there’s cultural differences to navigate. In Europe, the color is purple for the second part of this year and for next year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that purple is selling well in every country. Packaging varies for different types of stores. In the US, we tend to want everything to look big because our stores are big. But in a lot of countries, stores are much smaller in size, so everything is relative.