Most people think innovation as a quality only new businesses or new products require. However, one entrepreneur showed that innovation is important of all areas of business. Amanda Thomas, founder of the Luv AJ Jewelry Line, demonstrated innovation not only in her product but in how she marketed it.
Thomas created her jewelry line in 2005 when she was 16 years old, her after school obsession becoming a profitable business with unique accessories. While at Fred Segal, she randomly met a buyer who wanted her jewelry in all of their stores around the country. That was the first step for Luv AJ on the road of becoming a global empire. A student under famous designers such as Rachel Pally, Christina Ehrlich, and Estee Stanley, Thomas learned how to best create unique jewelry that appeals to lots of different crowds. Now, Luv AJ has boutiques all over the country and the jewelry is popular with a lot of celebrities. People like Beyoncé, Bella Hadid, Kylie Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, and Emma Roberts all praise Luv AJ and the unique heavy chains and spikes unique to that line.
While Luv AJ demonstrates tons of unique innovation, it’s Thomas’ intense marketing work 
that really shows an entrepreneurial mind. Forbes describes Thomas as a “digital native”, manipulating social media trends to bring her designs and products to the forefront of the market. From the start, Thomas used Instagram to immerse her brand in the world. She uses her talent for design to create an amazing Instagram page for her products that visual appealing. “Our Instagram grid is a mix of close up shots of ears, necks, and hands, lookbook and campaign imagery, photos of influencers and celebrities wearing the jewelry, and flat lays,” she says.
Thomas knows what an amazing platform social media is for marketing. Her unique photos and advertisements have vastly increased Luv AJ’s marketing reach. However, Thomas doesn’t stop there. She has worked hard to use different influential people to promote her product online, like models, singers, actresses, and so on. To best describe her innovative method of advertisement, she says, “Each season, we work with over 200 girls with a wide range of followers, and we gift them jewelry in exchange for a post and tag. With their tags, we get our product in front of new audiences with every single post.” Thomas isn’t picky about the number of followers or how popular the influencer is. She believes that someone with 50k followers opens up markets the same amount as one with 500k followers.
Thomas’ innovation with social media marketing and networking has paid off, big time. Yet she doesn’t rest on her success. She continues to build new relationships to increase her reach. Sometimes she directly messages influences to build a relationship, sometimes she gets referrals from others she’s worked with. Either way, she strives to create partnerships with new people to open up new markets. With products at $100 or lower, her line is spiking in popularity.
Thomas continues to innovate with her online presence to make buying even easier. “First, every single image we post is tagged to a product that is directly synced to our Shopify store. You can click-to-buy on a post and checkout on your mobile device. The second way is through the “Link in Bio” which leads you to our SHOP ALL collection. The third way you is through the app Four Sixty which makes our Instagram feed shoppable on our e-commerce store. Other tools we use that add efficiency are Planoly, VSCO, and Repost,” she says. Clearly these tools are working, as Luv AJ’s global empire expands and Thomas brings her unique jewelry to more markets. That’s true innovation: not only creating a new product but new ways of selling it.
One entrepreneur who made a name for himself in e-commerce and software is Hayden Bowles. At the young age of 12 years old, he began learning about business and traded stocks. In high school, all he did was sit in class on his phone and traded stocks, which his professors either allowed it or sent him to detention. By sophomore year of high school, he dropped out to pursue business. He started to pursue drop-shipping on Shopify and learned how to use Facebook and Instagram ads to leverage himself. He became so good that he generated roughly $20,000 per month just from Shopify drop-shipping alone. At the same time, Hayden worked hard to build his personal brand through his YouTube videos, Instagram page, and Snapchat following. He acquired business partners to help him manage his Shopify stores. At 17 years old, he embraced networking by meeting very prestigious people all over the country. He moved out of his parent’s house at this time in pursuit of his dream for financial independence and freedom. Hayden saw the opportunity to share his knowledge with the world by creating a buy-in mastermind course for drop-shipping where he provides exclusive strategies that he uses to build his own stores. I have personally joined this course when I built my own Shopify store and I can easily say it was worth the investment. Since then, Hayden has scaled his businesses and built new ones from the ground up. He is now projected to generate over $2 million in net income this year at the age of 18, and posts daily YouTube videos where he shares his knowledge and experiences.
As a homeschooler, Natalie and her family had to buy all of their books themselves, and as there was no curated or organized way to buy used book, they usually ended up buying these books new from publishers, which got very expensive. However, Natalie noticed that after he finished with a book, it just stayed on her bookshelf until it either was given away to a family friend or sold at a significantly reduced price at a yard sale. Natalie considered how wasteful this was, both on the buying end and the reselling end because there was no organized platform for homeschoolers to interact with each other in this manner. Out of this pain came her idea of Hoot Book Revival, which is an app and website on which homeschoolers can resell their books and buy used books from other homeschooling families at a reduced cost. This benefits both the buyer and the seller, because people looking to buy books can get them much cheaper than they can new books, and people looking to sell books can sell them for more than they could at a yard sale.
When I asked Natalie about how this business came about and what need it was filling, she said, “I suppose the core of the business idea was identifying an underrepresented group, and how their market needs weren’t being addressed, because the business pitch itself is pretty simple.” Natalie’s website allows the customer to buy and sell books, as well as collaborate with other homeschoolers on which lesson plans and books are best. Hoot Book Revival also has an option where people can post their books and let Hoot do all the work in finding people to sell them to, making the customer experience more enjoyable and less labor intensive.