Increasing international reach for Sky Goodies

Sky Goodies is a business built on soul. Its vibrant, joyous, papercraft models are designed for adults to bring out their inner child. It’s no surprise the family business has attracted attention from international media like Vogue, Elle Décor and Lonely Planet.

“It started as an experiment,” co-owner Misha Gudibanda explains. “After years of corporate design, we wanted to create something original, our own intellectual property, that we could put our soul into.”
 

Building trust with overseas business customers and consumers.

Sky Goodies launched on Etsy.com but quickly created its own international website. Orders came for individual, online shoppers and from corporate clients like retailers. For its new site, the business needed a widely recognised payment provider that would be easy to set up and manage, which would support business and consumer sales, and which would help a new small business quickly build credibility and trust.
 

A versatile partner for international sales.

“You have to make it easy for customers to pay,” says -owner Amit Gudibanda, Misha’s husband and co-owner. Sky Goodies chose PayPal so that it could provide cross-border shoppers with a familiar, trusted brand that enabled them to easily pay in their own currency. Sky Goodies uses PayPal Invoicing to invoice business customers and custom orders.

“We’ve tried using another payment gateway, but it fails a lot of times. PayPal has never failed for us,” Misha says.

“We also had issues when we used a different payment gateway, because customers would say, ‘We don’t trust this payment site,’” adds Amit. “When we use PayPal, customers don’t have any trust issues.”

Sky Goodies also uses PayPal to pay international, freelance designers who collaborate on projects.
 

Sales in 88 countries.

Covid-19 caused a dramatic change in Sky Goodies’ business. Lockdown meant that sales to retailers dried up, but owners Misha and Amit Gudibanda quickly adapted their business. They boosted their social media activity and targeted international, online shoppers with digital downloads of their designs rather than physical kits. PayPal easily supported the change from corporate to retail customers and, as a result, Sky Goodies’ web sales have trebled. Today, the business sells its digital craft kits to customers in 88 countries and ships physical craft kits to 25.

While determined to stay lean by using partnerships and automating as many administrative processes as possible (like using PayPal for payments), Sky Goodies now has 5 employees and works with a team of 15 regular freelancers.

“If something goes wrong,” she says, “PayPal has your back.”