Niche Spotlight: Kitchen

I want to start by telling you this: we only work with people that work within a niche (#nogeneralstores) because starting with a niche is how you build a brand that people care about.

A lot of the people that come to us are just starting out and we always offer brand specific (read: niche) advice for them, so we decided to have a monthly spotlight for different types of store niches.

Disclaimer: just so you know, we always suggest choosing a product or a store that you are fascinated by and can work on long term. If you’re creating your own niche kitchen products, that’s great because the creation process will give you a lot of content to work with. If you’re searching for products to sell for niche kitchen dropshipping, make sure that you test everything you’re going to sell and really use the products in your life so you can be the best ambassador for your products. 

Okay, okay, that’s enough of the lecture. Let’s jump into the kitchen niche.

About the Kitchen Niche

The kitchen niche will always be a popular choice because we have to eat.

Like most product sales right now, the kitchen products space is a competitive niche, but the good thing is that there is definitely space for a brand doing it the right way—especially if your products are affordable and high quality and the content you create is on point.

There’s no fudging with a store dedicated to a person’s kitchen because people take their relationship with food seriously. That means you shouldn’t get into the niche kitchen products world unless you’re really passionate about your own kitchen or you’ll be overrun in a friggen heartbeat.

That doesn’t mean you have to be a professional chef, people love to grow and learn with you! It just means that you have to be willing to put the time and energy into building this type of store for the people you want to serve.

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Who is your Potential Ideal Customer?

This is my favorite part. Before you jump into choosing products for your store, figure out what kind of kitchen person you want to target with your products, your content, and your lead generation.

The Total Beginner

These people need kitchen stuff. They’re either young on their own for the first time or they just never cook and they want to learn—maybe they want to impress someone?

These people need cheap, but quality (always freaking quality plz), products. They need a good set of knives that won’t break their banks, wooden stir sticks, a good spatula, and a nice set of affordable but durable pots and pans.

They are more likely to follow a recipe exactly, so a recipe e-book geared towards a specific type of diet is an awesome lead gen idea for this group of people.

The Chef

Maybe they’ve had formal training, maybe they’re a stay at home chef or maybe they work in the industry, but these people need the best of the best when it comes to kitchen stuff.

They’re going to buy your high ticket knives and they’re going to be picky as hell about the implements they use. They want the highest quality kitchen mixers, clay oven dishes, copper pots, and fancy utensils. They will buy the best ladle and then a matching set for their entire kitchen. It’s best if they can test and return if they don’t like it because these people prefer to shop in a store for their kitchen stuff so creating the ability for people to purchase and return is the best.

These people write the cookbooks, they also spend time dreaming up new recipes. They will respond really well to asks for user generated content as a result.

For lead generation for this group of people, use a coupon code for your products and make sure they know that you have a long return policy if they don’t like how the products handle. Email marketing is a must for this ideal customer.

The Kitchen Witch

I love this one because I fall into this category.

These are the people that make delicious, unique meals but have no real training in food.

They like herbs and spices, they want a plastic free kitchen with bamboo utensils and unique jars for their herbs and spices. They like basic, useable utensils and do care about what they look like because their kitchen is where they do their art.

The kitchen witch searches for recipes but don’t follow them to the letter, so offer them basic recipes for content and add a couple of unique suggestions.

They’re not super likely to download a cookbook, but a guide to spice pairings would be a great lead generation for these people.

The Collector

These are the people that maybe cook, or maybe they have a chef, or they just like impulse kitchen buying. They have money and they want to deck out their kitchen with things like garlic smashers, potato ricers, noodlers, apple slicers, orange slice squeezy things, tiny egg pans—you get it. These people just like kitchen gadgets.

The collector is unique in that it can lurk in any kind of kitchen person, so having a couple of high quality collector-y products no matter what ideal customer you’re going for but this is the only time within the kitchen niche for dropshipping that you can be a bit random in your selection of products.

These people like videos of someone using the products and they will make impulse purchases—so the shoppable insta feed is going to be ideal for you.

Type of Content for the Niche Kitchen

No matter what, if you’re selling kitchen implements, you should have recipes. Whether you’re getting it from your users, pulling it from classic recipe books, sharing other bloggers content on your blog (with permission), or creating unique recipes of your own, you have to have food-related stuff connected to your niche kitchen products brand.

Share the recipes on your social feeds—if you can make the recipes and take a nice photo, it’s ideal. Take photos and make videos of your products in use and post them on your social channels.

Maintenance Email frequency: Weekly – probably not more unless you’re having a big sale or a launch.

Interested in learning more? Check out Courtney’s perspective:

Are you thinking about building a brand around kitchen products? Tell us in the comments!

Photo by Icons8 team