Tell us a little about your products and how you got started.

Our origin can be best paraphrased by this short story involving our founder Toby and his son:

September 2013, adoptive father Toby Meisenheimer was putting a bandage on his son Kai’s forehead when he noticed for the first time that bandages were made to match only lighter skin tones. Why was this? Kai was already starting to ask questions about why his skin didn’t match his mom’s or his dad’s…would this be another thing he would eventually notice that would make him feel unmatched and out of place? Were Kai’s only alternatives a Star Wars bandage, or a “clear” bandage (with a white gauze square that eventually oozes the wound underneath it)?

For the last 4 ½ years, the Tru-Colour Bandages team has been risking time, energy, and personal savings toward changing the bandage industry. We sell latex-free bandages in shades darker than the standard single color offered by name and store brands. Last year, Target took notice, and in April 2018 they debuted our Diversity in Healing latex-free fabric bandages nationwide. Skin tone is beautiful and we hope that people feel comfortable in the skin they’re in.

How did you get your first sale?

Our first official sale was in 2014 via our Indiegogo campaign.

What strategies do you use to promote your products and get more sales?

A mixture of Facebook and intsagram ads, social media content, and influencer marketing.

What has been your biggest challenge along the way?

Finding and building out a sales niche while building the business as a part time endeavor has been one of the struggles. Sometimes a given business’ sales niche or audience isn’t exactly who one might think it is. Finding the identity of that niche can be a bit of a trial and error process.

Scaling the business can be tricky as well, especially when you fall short of your predictions or promising leads. There are a lot of moving parts from distribution to marketing to internal admin tasks. For a small company such as ours it can be a battle of balancing loose ends and miscellaneous (but necessary) tasks while simultaneously being future thinking. On a daily basis we can find ourselves in a bit of a situation like Nehemiah where one is both protecting and building the “wall” at the same time.

Based on your success, what advice would you give others who are just starting out?

When you aspire to your goals, take action today despite wanting plan out 2 years down the road in great detail. Additionally, attention is a powerful form of capital. In some respects social media is one of the greatest and most affordable means to gain attention for services or products. For this reason social media can be very competitive. It’s a great skill to learn to use social media in a way that adds value to potential customers. It can be deceptively easy to use platforms to blast the world with your information, but it takes a bit more time to craft that information in a manner an audience engages with. We are certainly not exempt from continuing to learn and grow in both of these points 🙂

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Thanks so much to the Tru-Colour team for taking the time to chat with us. You can shop their store here and find them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram by following those links or searching for tcbandages.

If you’re interested in being featured in our interview series, get in touch with us! We love sharing our customers’ stories.