Today we’d like to introduce you to Nilay Yuce Sengun.
Hi Nilay, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
First, thank you so much for being interested in our story. We love being the owners of a small business and being free to make decisions to chart our course together. As any business owner can tell you, the effort and work required gives us VERY little time for rest, but creating our own destiny as co-founders of The Loomia has been an incredibly rewarding experience for both of us.
Fahri and I met in Istanbul, Turkey in 2015 and we’ve both had varied work experiences – marketing, merchandising, and hospitality – but always working for other companies. We decided together in July 2017 to purchase Turkish towels and make them available to the US market. Quality cotton textiles are plentiful in Turkey, and it made logical sense to us to choose the best items that we would select ourselves and be proud to represent.
Piece by piece, we built our online platform and added to our product lines. We weren’t too proud to start very small, such as renting a booth at a local antique mall (before we even made the full-time move to the US), and participating in home shows and outdoor vendor markets when we were visiting the Charleston area. It helps that Fahri is very creatively inclined, a photographer and a quick design study for building our website with the help of some consultants.
I have experience marketing a television channel, so I was quick to pick up on the role of marketing for our company. We wanted to build the company organically, and day by day, we focused completely all the facets of the on company. As the brand and products began to build momentum, it became clear it would be entirely possible for us to move to the US and base our company there. We have family in Mount Pleasant, SC so it seemed a natural fit for us to choose there, as we just had our son, Deniz, and we wanted to have some family around us when raising him.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
At this time of our move to the United States, our financial risks and personal risks were really adding up – leases on retail spaces and homes, inventory to keep up with demand, and stepping away from everything familiar and our loved ones in Turkey. We both were convinced that even if the worst scenario were to happen – a crash of our site, overwhelming bills with not enough income, that our last option would always be to begin again in Turkey and have the option to pick up where we left off working for another company.
Then the unexpected took us even beyond our “scary” scenarios – the pandemic struck mid-March and caused a complete shutdown of businesses exactly 2 weeks after we opened our first Loomia retail store. We had just put together all our Ikea display shelves and arranged the every towel, robe, and pillow in the store perfectly! I can only be grateful that our website was ready for the influx of sales from people stranded at home. So even though the retail was a big financial drain, our online sales were enough to keep the entire company afloat.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
The Loomia is an online and retail boutique that sells the finest quality Turkish cotton textiles – towels for home, bath and beach, blankets and throws, pillows and robes for men and women. Founded by Fahri and Nilay Sengun, The Loomia is a small business that loves its relationships with its clientele. So many loyal customers love the fact that we hand select these textiles, and for the comfort and beauty they add to their lives. We feel passionately that we have a collection of the finest home and outdoor products that are a joy to bring to market.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk-taking?
We chose every day to be ok with the unknown possibility of failure, because really the whole world was in upheaval, and we realized that with our young son and with each other to lean on, we just needed to focus on what we could control. We were both busy enough that there wasn’t much downtime to worry about making the wrong choices or decisions because we just had to keep moving. Neither of us had experience steering this size company or keeping up with more product demand, but we made the best choices we could as each decision presented itself. We know the mistakes we made, we sometimes yelled (just a little) but still today we wake up feeling like we chose this path together, and for that reason alone, we are happy with it. I am proud of what we have built and I feel we still have much more road to travel with our company.
Pricing:
- 18$ Turkish Hand Towels
- 29$ Turkish Bath Towels
- 49$ Turkish Blanket
Contact Info:
- Email: nilays@theloomia.com
- Website: www.theloomia.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theloomia/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheLoomia
Image Credits
The Loomia
