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Cap Wholesalers, Accessories By Us, and Customized Wear: Joi Guarino

Keep Your Caps On!

Joi Guarino's father got her into the business of selling headwear in 1990. At that time, Guarino's business customers were solicited through phone, fax and catalogs. Seventeen years and three websites later, Guarino has left the world of catalogs behind and now markets her successful businesses completely online.

Guarino's business selling headwear such as baseball caps, visors and the like was originally strictly wholesale. She had many established relationships with headwear suppliers that manufactured the caps and had successful sales to people within the industry, such as the screen printing and embroidery industries. But she decided to take the business one step further, and instead of selling strictly to people within the industry she started marketing to the end user.

As the Internet grew, Guarino recognized its importance to her business and made the switch from phone, fax and catalogs to strictly Internet marketing. She shopped around intensively before settling on Datahost. “I spent weeks searching various web designers,” she says. “I wound up calling Datahost and I think the first person I spoke to was Staci and she impressed me. I was like, ‘wow, this is going to really work,’ and its been great ever since.”

Accessoriesbyus.com was first started in 2002 as a site for wholesalers. “It’s password protected,” says Guarino, “so we wound up in the search rankings and end user people would e-mail us wanting to get pricing and we couldn’t sell to them. That’s when I said, ‘you know what, I need to create a different website that I can gear more toward the end user.’”

Shortly after, in 2003, Guarino began Capwholesalers.com, also a wholesale website but one which allows customers to purchase any number of dozens of items that they want, with tiered pricing for one to 11 dozens or twelve dozens or more. “Then after that it was like, OK, everybody wants embroidery and screen printing, so now we offer that,” she says. The embroidery and screen-printing website, Customizedwear.com came later, and offers accessories of many different types, not just headware. They sell all kinds of hats, but also aprons, golf caps, totes and bags and men’s, women’s and children’s tee and polo shirts.

Go to Accessories By Us	Go to Cap Wholesalers
Go to Customized Wear

Guarino says she tries to learn as much as she can about her business and she spends quite a bit of money on pay-per-click advertising. She always takes into consideration marketing techniques she can do herself such as e-mail marketing. She also appreciates that MightyMerchant’s software makes the day-to-day site maintenance easy enough to do herself. “I’m so busy with the business that I barely have time to run the business let alone venturing off into computers or something that’s not related to what I’m already doing!” she says.

When Guarino first signed with Datahost, Michael and Staci used to do all of the submitting to the search engines; this was before Pay Per Click Advertising took hold. “We were constantly number one,” she says. “Then the ratings dropped because they changed Google, so it was like, ok, now what do we do? Michael told me all about these things to do like use Google AdWords and Overture,” Guarino explains. “They really gave me the information I needed to make it successful. They know their stuff.”

Now Guarino’s businesses are so successful she never solicits business anymore. “I have repeat business but that’s not my main function. They come back, but I don’t necessarily need them to come back we have so much business.” The marketplace has changed tremendously since Guarino first started fifteen years ago. “If customers like your website, they like your item, and they like your pricing, then they just place their order,” she says. “If you ship on time and give good customer service they’re happy. So we try to provide that and we’re doing really well.”

Thanks Joi! Has MightyMerchant made a difference to your business? If so, let us hear about it. We’re dedicated to your success, and we certainly hope all of our clients feel the way about us that Joi does.