Welcome to my workshop: selling online without selling your soul

Come in, come in. This is Barronico, and this is my workshop notebook.

My name is Juan Carlos Barrón and I've spent 28 years in shops. Zara, Chanel, Lladró, Galeries Lafayette. London, Paris, Madrid, and now Zamora. I've dressed shop windows in the small hours, fought over a badly placed mannequin and seen up close what makes someone stop in front of a pane of glass and end up walking in. And it all started with something silly: I began photographing shop windows and posting them on Facebook, for free, asking nothing from anyone, just because I felt that work deserved someone stopping to look at it.

Barronico is my lab. Two things live here that plenty of people think don't go together at all: MATERIA, what you touch (signature pieces, ceramics, sewing, shop windows, events), and CÓDIGO, what you code (websites, online stores, SEO, digital strategy). To me they're exactly the same thing, and you'll see why. Very soon you'll see it with your own eyes, at street level, at Balborraz 14, the artisans' street of Zamora.

And don't let the address fool you: we're in Zamora, but we work for the world. At Barronico we speak Spanish, English and French, and I've spent my whole career working abroad, in London, Paris and Madrid, with brands that play in the international league. So whether your shop is in Zamora, Lyon or Manchester, we'll understand each other just as well.

I'm going to write here the way I talk. No formulas, no filters, no snake oil. And to kick things off, let's cut to the chase: how you really grow a small shop online.

Stop counting likes, they don't pay the rent

I say this with love, but I'm saying it: followers, views and likes are great for the ego, but they don't pay the electricity bill. For years I've watched brands show off gorgeous social media numbers while their till was shaking.

What makes a shop work is much more old-school: people coming back. Recommending you. Feeling your shop is a bit theirs. The fancy people call it relationship marketing. I call it doing what your local shopkeeper always did: remembering your name, putting aside what they knew you'd like, telling you where the goods came from. The internet hasn't killed that. Quite the opposite: it multiplies it, if you know how to use it.

• +Looking after the customers you already have is way cheaper than going out to hunt new ones.
• +A happy customer is worth more than any campaign: they talk about you for free, and with more credibility than you.
• +The relationship is the one thing no giant can copy. Not Amazon, not Shein, not Temu, nobody.
• +And on top of that, they tell you what they want. For free. You just have to listen.

Growth marketing, or how to grow without praying for luck

These days it sounds great to drop "growth marketing" in a meeting, and half the time nobody really knows what they're talking about. Here it is, plain and simple: it's growing with method. Looking at the whole path someone takes from not even knowing you exist to raving about you, and improving each stretch bit by bit, testing and measuring.

Old-school marketing works campaign by campaign: you prepare it, launch it, cross your fingers and move on. Growth is a loop: I have an idea ("if I show the workshop on the product page, I'll sell more"), I test it, I see what happens, I learn and start again. You don't need money. You need consistency and the honesty to face the numbers, even when they don't tell you what you want to hear.

The whole path, from stranger to fan

I see it exactly like a street shop, because that's what it is:

• +They discover you: they walk past the window, find you on Google or someone tells them about you.
• +They come in: first impressions. If in three seconds they don't get what you sell and why it's cool, they're gone. On the street and online, same thing.
• +They come back: because you gave them a reason. A newsletter that isn't a drag, real new arrivals, a way of treating them they remember.
• +They buy more: average order value, what they take on top of what they came for. The good old impulse buy at the till.
• +They recommend you: reviews, photos, friends who turn up saying "so-and-so sent me".

Notice that? Three of the five steps are pure relationship. That's why growth and old-school marketing don't fight: growth just measures and pushes what the relationship builds.

Small tests, big changes

You don't need a NASA lab. Change one thing at a time and see what happens: a product's main photo, the threshold for free shipping, an email subject line, what the buy button says. If it works, it stays. If it doesn't, bin it and try the next one. Do that for a year and watch how the whole operation changes.

The numbers I look at

• +Conversion: out of every hundred people who come in, how many buy.
• +Average order: how much each of them spends.
• +What a new customer costs you: ads, hours and tools added up. Yes, your hours count too.
• +Repeat buying: how many come back.
• +What a customer brings you while they stay with you.

And one rule I'd tattoo on my forehead: if winning a customer costs you more than they bring you, growing just gets you to ruin faster. As simple as that.

Online stores for small shops, without botched jobs

I've seen it a thousand times: a shop opens a website because "you have to be online", leaves it gathering dust, and six months later hasn't sold a single sock. And the blame goes to the platform, to Google or to the economy. Nope. What was missing was a strategy. Before you choose where to build your store, answer this:

1. What do you sell online? (Not everything, relax)

You don't need to upload the whole stockroom. Start with what travels well, what has enough margin to cover shipping, what makes sense without touching it and, above all, what makes you different: one-of-a-kind pieces, short runs, things you can't find everywhere. I'd take a small shop with soul over an endless bazaar where you can't find anything, any day.

2. Your own website or a marketplace?

Marketplaces give you a shop window, sure, but they take a commission, impose their rules and the customer is theirs, not yours. Your own website is your home: your data, your relationship, your rules. Mind you, you have to bring people to your home yourself. If your brand has personality, your own website isn't optional.

3. The product page is your shop assistant

In the shop, when someone hesitates, the shop assistant is there to help. Online there's nobody: just the product page. So the page has to do that job: genuinely good photos from several angles and in context, dimensions, materials, how to care for it, the story behind the piece, and crystal-clear shipping and returns. A product page that doesn't answer questions loses the sale, just like a shop assistant who doesn't even know what they're selling.

4. Shipping, payments and trust

Let customers know what it costs and when it arrives before they pay, not with a little surprise at the last step. Easy returns. Let them pay the way they always pay. And your address and phone number in plain sight. This is where the little guy wins hands down: showing there's a real shop behind it, with a flesh-and-blood person who answers, builds a trust no giant can fake.

5. Bring your street shop and your online shop together

Your customers don't think in "channels", they think of your shop. So make them help each other: buy online and pick up in store, browse online and come in to try, a website that shows what's happening in the shop, a window that invites people to follow you, and your Google profile up to date. We call it phygital, and it's exactly what a small shop can do better than any chain.

6. Bring people in, win them over, make them come back

With the house in order, time to get it moving: SEO so people find you (on Google and in the AIs that already answer for us), content that tells why your stuff is different, social media with real products and real faces, a newsletter (the only channel that's yours and doesn't depend on some algorithm's mood) and, once all that works, ads to speed things up. Never the other way round.

My 90-day plan

• +Days 1 to 30, the foundations: pick the products you start with, make product pages that are a joy to read, sort out shipping and payments, install analytics and update your Google profile.
• +Days 31 to 60, bring people in: SEO on product and category pages, content, consistent social media (consistency, not showing off) and start collecting subscribers, online and at the counter.
• +Days 61 to 90, fine-tune: look at the data, run your first test, set up the abandoned cart email and the "come back anytime" one, and decide with numbers, not hunches, whether ads are worth your money.

Tools aren't magic

Content, SEO, social media, ads, data analysis, web design. People will try to sell you each one as if it were a magic wand. None of them is. A beautiful website nobody finds is a beautiful shop window on an empty street. Ads that lead to a website that doesn't convince are money down the drain. The trick is making everything one single journey, and measuring it so you keep improving it. That's what I do. That's CÓDIGO.

So what's next?

On this blog I'll tell you all this with real cases and no beating around the bush: shop windows and websites, one-of-a-kind pieces and growth strategies, what happens on Balborraz and what happens on screen. To me it's the same craft, and it always will be.

If you have a shop or a brand and want to grow online without losing what makes you unique, write to me at info@barronico.es. You'll get me, not a bot.

Welcome. Things happen in here.