This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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What's up, what's up, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. Good story and a good lesson for you today. Now, lots of people have asked about how to find manufacturers, especially overseas manufacturers, either for a custom product that you want to make or for items you want to purchase to resell. Well, there is a great resource you can use called Alibaba.
It's a global directory that connects manufacturers, suppliers, business owners, entrepreneurs, really anyone with an idea. It can be used for lots of different things. I'll show you an example today of how two college buddies used it to design, produce, and then sell their own custom bow ties. The project has made $15,000 for them so far and they're hoping to grow it much more. That story right after this.
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Today's story comes from Chris DeAntonio in Virginia. Chris is a recent college graduate who works in software sales. Back in college, he and his buddy Kyle Boswell started Virginia Southern, a brand selling affordable bow ties. Now here's how Chris got the idea. A week before his birthday, his mom called and asked him what he wanted.
He thought about it and decided he wanted to improve his wardrobe with a nice button down shirt and a bow tie. But when he started looking around, he realized how expensive most bow ties were. And he came to the realization that if he was buying it himself, he could only afford one measly bow tie. They cost about $60 each. And at the time as a college student, he didn't have a lot of spare cash.
On a whim, he tried making his own, but that didn't go super great. He found a stencil and instructions online. He cut up an old t-shirt according to the instructions, started to hand stitch it and decided pretty quickly it wasn't up to par. Maybe it was because he had no experience in sewing outside of a brief high school home economics class, or maybe the instructions were just too complicated. In any case, Chris decided to go bigger.
On a Thursday afternoon, he decided he wanted to sell quality affordable bow ties. By Friday night, he had created a website, found a manufacturer and just needed to pay for inventory and find someone to run the project with him. That's where his friend Kyle came in. So how did he find that manufacturer? Well, he first started looking for a company in the US.
He did find some textile factories, but he saw pretty quickly that they were cost prohibitive. He wanted to provide high quality at a low price. So he realized he would need to source from overseas. To do that, he turned to one website called Alibaba.com and found manufacturers for everything he needed. Bow ties, matching pocket squares, custom packaging, even bumper stickers.
The site allowed him to search for products and find corresponding manufacturers. It lets you sort through different companies based on ratings, trade assurance, and other factors. Chris liked the process of going through different product offerings, emailing back and forth, even negotiating over price and minimum order quantity. He began by filtering his search results to highly rated manufacturers that made men's ties. He then narrowed it down to three or four companies that he liked and began that communication process.
He asked them questions about lead time, shipping terms, pricing, how customizable they could be, and so on. Now on this network, Alibaba, manufacturers are very competitive with one another. They will respond to inquiries within an hour, often sooner than that and sometimes 24 hours a day. So Chris would kind of use the information from one manufacturer to barter down the price with another one or to try and save hundreds of dollars by getting free shipping. And then finally, he requested a sample product, which allowed him to see the attention to detail as well as the overall quality.
It took a couple of weeks for the sample to come in the mail. So during that time, Chris and Kyle improved that website, got a logo design done on fiverr.com for just $25, and prepared to go into business. When they received the sample, they felt fortunate. They knew they had met the right manufacturer that met their expectations. Chris and Kyle then scratched together $1,000 for their first inventory, a big investment for them, but one they were excited to make.
The final product was a high quality bow tie and pocket square combo that sold for just $25 to $30, compared to those expensive 60 to $80 ones already on the market. They took all the photos for the website themselves. They used their friends as models. And Chris said later, what I think was so cool about creating this brand was finding these unique and inexpensive ways to get it up and running. It really is amazing how much you can do with almost no cash.
The online store took off, not right away, but slowly and surely. Within the first few months, they were making about $200 or $300 a month. Then it got up to $500 a month. And eventually they decided to try to sell their bow ties in college bookstores. When they did that, they discovered that most of these bookstores are actually owned by big companies like Barnes and Noble.
So instead they went after those few privately held bookstores and off campus unofficial bookstores. They noticed that most of those stores didn't offer bow ties at all, or the ones they carried were expensive and kind of boring. Their brand is called Virginia Southern. So the Virginia Tech bookstore has been especially good for them. After two years working part time, Chris and Kyle are now in 10 different bookstores, have made a bit more than $15,000 in profit.
They've also had a couple of first place finishes in local craft fairs. Their biggest failure was when they were trying to produce t-shirts to add to the line. They thought that would be a good idea, but it wasn't. Once again, they went abroad for a low cost option, but this time it didn't work out so well. They got a batch of t-shirts with holes, crooked logos, and inaccurate sizes.
They ended up giving them all away and decided to stick to bow ties for now. This year they're working on getting into more bookstores, improving their online sales, and continuing to see where they can take this hustle. [Music]
So congrats to Chris and Kyle. Virginia Southern sounds fun. And I wanted to use this story to illustrate the lesson of finding manufacturers for the first time, especially if you want to produce something overseas.
Now that brings us to Alibaba, the same tool that Chris and Kyle used, and I'm pretty sure the same tool that some of our other featured stories have used as well. If you just go and look at that website, Alibaba.com, it can look a bit overwhelming. There is a lot of stuff there. Now, as I said, it's a global network, connecting manufacturers, vendors, suppliers, in all sorts of different categories. So obviously in textiles and apparel, like we heard in this story, but also all kinds of other stuff, consumer electronics, beauty and personal care, sports, gifts, toys, mechanical parts of all kinds.
So there's two ways to use this site, or it's actually probably more than two, but to keep it simple. The first way is if you're like Chris, and you have a specific idea, and you're like, I know I want to make bow ties, or whatever my thing is. Well, that's great because you've got it narrowed down. You can go to this website, create a free membership, start looking at the textile providers, narrow it down just like he did, and then begin that process of back and forth, trying to get a sample, see what works for you. And the second way, if you don't have a specific idea like he did, but you like this idea of making something, creating your own brand, or simply buying product to resell, which some of our other stories have done.
Well, in that case, you might want to spend some time, let's say at least an hour or two, whenever you can fit it in, just getting more familiar with how this whole network works. There's a lot of help pages on the site. There are a lot of different links and categories. You're not gonna learn everything you need to know in an hour, but you can get a general surface understanding of how the process works. And from there, you can start to narrow it down and say, okay, now that I see all these different products, all these different manufacturers, is there something that speaks to me?
Does this spark an idea for me? And honestly, your greatest challenge is probably going to be narrowing it down because there are so many different options. One tip from Chris before I sign off, he says in his experience, reading reviews and tracking ratings was a good first step, but he thinks you can get a much better understanding of the company based off your conversation with the salespeople, as well as the initial sample you get. The quality ranges widely from very high to very low, even on the same search page. So being able to figure out which works best for you is probably the most critical task.
Well, I hope that is helpful to you today. We will link up Virginia Southern and Alibaba on the show notes page for today's episode, which is at sidehustleschool.com/129. That is for episode 129. Big surprise, episode 130 is coming tomorrow. I know, it's a shocker.
As always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. So think about what you could make, just like Chris and Kyle did, and then go out and actually make it. I hope you do that, I'll be cheering you on. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Sidehustleschool. [Music]
