The Occasion Co.

theoccasionco.nz

At the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020 my partner was made redundant from her new job so we decided to start our own business offering laser engraved products focusing initially on wedding decor, baby and home gifts. The plan was then to grow our product list throughout the year as public holidays and celebrations came around, for example; Mother's Day, Easter, Christmas etc.

We started with analysing our competition, finding product sources and completing a detailed cost analysis. We then ordered our laser machine and everything else we needed to get up and running. I began working on the website with a focus on user experience. We wanted the site to be beautiful, clean and simple. We created an easy method to customise/personalise each product and get the customer through to checkout as effortless as possible. We aimed the website at an audience willing to spend a bit more on quality, which was also the main focus of our initial product sourcing.

We designed dozens of monograms and custom designs for each and every product, tailoring them to the dimensions of the item. The user can then choose their design on the site when purchasing and input their personalisation. We made countless custom gifts for friends and family in the first few months in order to practise and help get our name out there. We then officially launched in December 2020.

We created our own custom Instagram grid template as we wanted our social media aesthetic to match our website, clean and beautiful. We also added Social Media and Google Ads to help boost our rankings alongside the SEO optimisation I did for the site. This included making sure tags were correctly applied, reevaluating the product descriptions and making sure simple things like ALT tags and page titles included the correct keywords.