Hello World - Petteri's first blog 😇

Hello World 🌎 - I would like to talk 🔈 about myself a little in my first article. My name is Petteri Pucilowski and I am a business owner. I was born and raised in Kuopio, Finland. I started my business journey in 2010 with an online business called Gameon.fi. We specialized in selling video games to our Finnish customers and had a nice turnover - but our profits were lacking. After a few years we decided it was time to re-invent ourselves and my wife had a brilliant idea of taking what we had learned from our Gameon.fi venture and use it to build a fashion store instead.

New venture - HerSecret.fi

And as a result HerSecret.fi was born. After just a few months we started to see it had been the right decision - we were turning a profit. Hooray! Since then we have been growing steadily, adding more items to our catalogue and improving our service - we are proud of what we’ve become. We serve +100k Finnish customers and are looking to expand to neighboring countries.

As our logistics operations have been outsourced to Axla Logistics since the beginning, we have had the chance to develop unique customer journeys and provide top notch service online - we pride ourselves with being the fastest to answer any queries and we even offer same day deliveries to some cities.

The technical side of the business

During the years I have been an online retailer (or e-tailer for short), I have self-taught myself many business-related skills - especially relating to the online part of it all. I am proficient in setting up and maintaining Prestashop shops (have also some basic skills with other e-commerce platforms, for example Shopify and Woocommerce). I am also very experienced in setting up servers and containers, be it dedicated servers, docker/lxc containers or VPS:s. I also have experience in maintaining clusters and setting up Docker swarm / Kubernetes services.

Building automations on Whatsapp

As a part of our business operations I have also setup a lot of automations and functions that help with our every day tasks. I am constantly looking for new ways to improve our service and HerSecret.fi offers near 100% of the customer service in WhatsApp - since this is where most of our customers are already. Our customer service journey starts with our customers first receiving the order confirmation via Whatsapp, then the shipment details. After they have received the parcel, we ask them if the piece of clothing they had ordered fits well and to submit their review online - of course this is done via WhatsApp, too. When they answer the message, the service will continue in the same channel.

Building new chat experiences

Lately I have been building multi-channel chat experiences - for the customer service team it’s a must to have all the channels (Email, Chat, Facebook Messenger, SMS and WhatsApp) in the same portal. It is also important that the agents can easily find the customer data - and I have implemented a solution that queries for customer data from our Prestashop back end and provides it in the customer service portal instantly. This helps streamline the customer service process even further when the personnel don’t have to jump between several systems.

New builds with React (and GatsbyJS)

I am also building some lightning fast Jamstack applications using React, GatsbyJS and NextJS to provide even better online experiences. For reference on the NextJS application please see blog.hersecret.fi. This blog is built on GatsbyJS. Our ecommerce site (www.hersecret.fi) is also running on a custom GatsbyJS build powered by Blink-cart.com.