The Shop With Two Beginnings

Serhii Merkulov dates his vocation from an event that predates the online shop now attached to his business. Asked when the work became real, he goes back roughly 25 years. The website came later.

The domain denim.ua was registered on 4 March 2011, about 10 years after the starting point Merkulov names, leaving his story with two beginnings rather than one clean launch. The earlier beginning belongs to his memory of finding a product and attempting to sell it, while the later one belongs to a dated internet record that lets an outsider identify when the online storefront acquired its address without recovering the work that came before.

Before the shop had an address

A domain registration makes a convenient anniversary because it fixes a business to a date that remains publicly visible. Merkulov nevertheless chooses the attempted sale, treating the encounter with a product and a possible buyer as more decisive than the later technical act of registering an address, so his personal chronology begins well before the online one and remains distinct from it.

Today denim.ua is operating and offers jeans from Levi’s, Wrangler, Lee, and other brands, while Merkulov describes the store itself as 15 years old. That age agrees with the domain record, but his account of the vocation reaches back to the first test of whether the product could be sold, making the website a later form of work he already recognized rather than the dramatic birth of an occupation.

For Merkulov, the work began with a product and an attempted sale, not with the arrival of the website.

Merkulov does not describe the 10-year interval as a period of preparation, and the chronology alone does not give it that meaning. The record explains neither the intervening years nor the cause of the store’s endurance. What remains is the choice he makes when telling the story: he begins with the merchandise and the attempt to sell it, not with the infrastructure that followed, a personal marker that asks no strategic lesson of the gap. That distinction is enough.

The year of two orders

Merkulov remembers the online store’s first year through the unusual weight carried by a very small number of completed transactions. According to his questionnaire for this publication, the shop made 2 sales during that year, and one ended with the item being replaced when the parcel was collected, turning a scarce order into the sharpest bad experience in his account of the period. The incident came through an actual order.

The consequence appears in the boundary he later set for his own operation: Merkulov stopped sending goods with payment due on receipt. After the bad exchange, one method of completing a sale was removed from Merkulov’s store, and he continued operating with a boundary that the earlier transaction had made necessary in his own account.

Another detail from the early period concerns a good acquaintance who advised Merkulov to begin working on the website’s promotion. Merkulov says he followed the recommendation, and his recollection leaves promotion at that practical level: something a trusted acquaintance told him to attend to and something he began doing for the online shop. He took up the task.

The opening year survives in four compact details rather than in a continuous history of operations. Merkulov remembers few purchases, a transaction that ended badly, a payment rule that was withdrawn, and advice that moved promotion onto his agenda, a sequence in which the work appears as a series of responses to events that reached his own store.

An answer placed everywhere

The most immediate example in Merkulov’s account comes from a later problem that sounds simpler than choosing a product or deciding how customers may pay. Buyers want help choosing the right jeans size, so Merkulov recorded an explanatory video, published it on YouTube, placed it on the store’s home page, and added it to every product page where someone considering an item might plausibly look for guidance. Customers continued to ask.

Merkulov’s observation begins when the question reaches him, after the guidance has already been distributed across the places under his control. He sees the recurring request and the information placed before it, an experience tied to his own shop and expressed through a simple fact of his working day: customers continue to ask which size they should choose.

For these customers, publishing the sizing guidance did not remove the wish to ask Merkulov directly about fit. The recording remains available on the channel, the home page, and the product pages, while incoming questions provide another route to the same subject and keep a person inside a transaction that the website appears to have arranged from catalogue to explanation. Both routes remain open.

This repetition shows the merchant at work more clearly than an anniversary can, because the domain date records when an address appeared while the sizing question reveals a task that returns. Merkulov has already answered in a durable form and arranged for the information to follow each product across the store, yet a buyer can still bring the subject back as a direct exchange that requires him to answer once more.

What Merkulov notices

Across Merkulov’s account, the business appears through particular acts rather than through a continuous operational history. He finds a product, attempts a sale, opens the site, changes a payment policy, begins promotion, records an explanation, and answers buyers who still ask, keeping the sequence close to the ordinary work of responding when a transaction creates a new problem. The details remain specific.

The first beginning therefore remains the one Merkulov remembers, while the second remains the public date attached to the online shop. One identifies when he first recognized the product as something to sell; the other identifies when the storefront entered the internet record and began the age he gives it today, allowing both points to hold their own meaning without being assembled into a story of deliberate strategic delay.

What follows those beginnings is smaller and more human than a theory of survival: Merkulov puts his sizing explanation on YouTube, the home page, and every product page, then hears the same question again from customers. His conclusion belongs to that practice and those exchanges, where the answer can be published everywhere he controls and still return as a request addressed to him personally. For Merkulov, the technology around the transaction changed, while in his own store the need to answer remained.