My summer Start-Up experience

Hello, my name is Jake Lewis. I am a senior who is about to graduate from Klein College of Media and Communication studying Advertising with a concentration in Brand Strategy and Research.  At the beginning of the summer I was asked by my former Diamond Edge Communication client if I was looking for a job.  He told me about this start-up dry cleaning and laundry delivery service called iHATElaundry.com that was looking for a marketing and sales coordinator.  After he introduced me to the CEO of the company we set up a few interview sessions over Zoom I was hired. I began working the last week of May. This start-up is a part of a local dry cleaning company located in South Jersey called Any Garment Cleaners.  All work was done from home which was great because I was taking classes during summer 1 so this allowed me to work and complete my classes all in one location. I was quickly put in charge of Google Ads, operating HubSpot, and running the Facebook page among other things. My job started off as doing market research as well as figuring out what the best marketing/advertising strategy would be to help us break into the Philadelphia market and gain clientele.  The biggest thing that I learned while working for a start-up is that you need to be able to adjust to change.  While working for a start up trying to make a name for itself more often than not things you had planned will need to be adjusted. I also learned that it is very difficult to try and build a business while the world is still going through a pandemic. About a month into work my team began to focus more on the parent company Any Garment Cleaners. Since the pandemic had made the business go down we needed to begin to try and raise foot traffic into the store so that we could continue working on iHATElaundry.com. I began working on different social media and sales campaigns as well as coming up with new promotions to try and bring in new customers. One thing that I was able to set up to try and drive brand awareness was I set up an interview with NBC 10 Philadelphia.  After I emailed a bunch of local media sources about how the store was able to survive the coronavirus pandemic. About a week later I woke up one morning and saw an email from a representative from NBC 10 who wanted to do a live segment about the store.  The next week Any Garment Cleaners was interviewed and featured in their”Open for Business” segment on.  This experience was very different from any other internship or job experience I’ve had in the past. Not only is it the first start-up that I have worked for but it is my first time working entirely from home.  I would have to say the best part was being able to learn more about digital marketing through expanding my Google Ads knowledge as well as the gained social media marketing experience. It was very cool to be a part of a smaller company and be able to watch it grow because of the work that my my team and I put into it.