This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, what's up? This is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle School. And as we get started with today's episode, I want to give a shout out to all of the busy parents who are listening to Side Hustle School. Often hear from lots of different folks, in particular some single moms, single dads, really anyone who's a parent and just trying to juggle a lot of different stuff. Today's story is for you. And even if you're not a parent, you
can learn an important branding lesson from one savvy mom who launched her own private label Line Hustle. Heather Christian works as an accountant for a San Diego company. She's also a mom and after having her daughter, she was super stressed out about returning to work. With the burden of trying to show she was still a hard worker, plus trying to be a good mom, getting back to the gym, all this kind of stuff, she told herself one day, "Man, I'm one stressed mommy." The name stuck and she set out to discover if a mom could really build a business they wanted, starting part time in between the day job and the whole new world of childcare. The next step was to consider what should the brand "Stressed Mommy" sell? Her first
idea was that "Stressed Mommy" was a great name for a brand of wine. And that became her first product. You probably think it's difficult to start your own brand of wine and presumably it is hard to plant your own vineyard, but that's not what Heather did. Instead of planting grapes, she went to Google and typed in three words, "Private label wine." From there, she discovered it was actually pretty simple. There are a number of wineries and other companies that will actually do all this for you. They make the wine and they
put your company's name or just your name on the bottle. Now, it may not always be the best wine in the world, but as long as you're not trying to be deceptive about it, it's not uncommon at all to have a name on the bottle that doesn't relate to the original producer. Heather was good at doing research. So when she was trying to decide on a vendor and figure out what to do next, she asked a lot of questions, both of herself and of potential vendors. And I'll share a few of them with you here, but if you want to read the show notes for this episode, you can get the whole list of questions. And starting
with the vendor questions, as she navigated this world, here are a few things that she learned to ask. First up, does the vendor want you to provide a logo? And then do they want to do a label mock? Second, are they sending these products to you to add your label or do they do it? Third, are you going to source from the US or from overseas? Heather
decided to just do US sourcing because it seemed easier for her. What is the supplier's minimum order quantity? Will they send you a sample so that you could judge the quality before you buy? And then here are a few things that she asked herself as she was planning this project. Do I have room to store the products? Do I need to get a warehouse, a
storage unit somewhere else? Do these products have an expiration date, which is probably going to affect the quantity that I order? Do I have money to invest in advertising? Even if I have money to invest in advertising, do I want to invest in advertising? Do I just want to try to grow that brand over social media, which can be kind of like the chicken and egg problem? Do you grow a brand, then introduce a product, or do you start with
the product and then grow the brand? And lots of other questions and kind of topics that she explored to figure out, okay, what is the process to move forward with this project? And this research process allowed Heather to learn more about how the private label industry worked, and it also helped her decide for herself which direction she wanted to go in. Now, along the same time, she began to learn about dropshipping, where other companies maintain inventory and then ship directly to customers that are provided by Heather. So she would send the addresses, and then these companies would send the product. And
this led to a really interesting lesson. You should pay attention to this if you're ever interested in dropshipping. Heather signed up for a 30-day trial of an online consolidated dropship database. And these are the companies that have a database of vendors who will do the dropshipping for you. They put your name on the packing slip instead of theirs. And
if you Google dropshipping, how to dropship, any phrases like this, you're very likely to stumble on these companies that they make money by being a middleman. But when she looked into a sample of their products and compared the price on Amazon, a lot of them didn't really allow for any profit, especially when you factored in the cost of using their database. So here's what was interesting. Heather spoke on the phone with one of the sales reps, and he casually dropped this phrase. He casually mentioned, "Oh, one of our benefits is we save you the time of contacting the vendor yourself." Well, that was clearly a mistake on his part, because to a resourceful person like Heather, what it communicated was, "Oh, if I can just figure out how to contact the vendor myself, I can probably get a much better deal." So that's exactly what she did. And that's what made all the difference as she
proceeded with starting the wine sales and then looking for other products. In fact, after she got her own stressed mommy wine up for sale, she continued to experiment in the world of private labeling and the world of dropshipping. And she now also sells spa products, which seems like another great fit for the stressed mommy brand, spa products and wine. Now, remember, this is a side hustle. She's still working a day job. She's got all
these other responsibilities, but between her website, stressedmommy.com, and her sales that she does through Amazon, in just a short period of time, Heather was averaging more than $1,000 a month in profit as she continues to work the day job and continues to explore opportunities for the future. And on that same site, stressedmommy.com, she also shares her lessons learned, and she's planning to begin consulting with people who'd like to build a part time hustle in the same way that she has. So let's talk about this. What a fun story. I really love the story. I personally am inspired
when I hear about how people like Heather have prioritized these things in their life and been able to make side hustling work even with all their responsibilities. And also, what a great name, stressed mommy. Like as soon as you hear that, you immediately know what it's about and who it's for. You could probably even guess what the brand sells without knowing anymore, or if nothing else, at least you're not surprised when you hear it sells wine and spa products. If you're thinking of starting this hustle, there's a really common mistake a lot of people make. And what's usually best is to make one thing work well,
make one product line work well, and then expand slowly. What people tend to do is I'm in a private label, six different products, you know, they may be they're related, maybe they're completely different, but that doesn't usually work very well. You'll establish more loyalty to the brand over time by being targeted and specific and intentional. And just a quick note on dropshipping. I've actually gotten a lot of emails about this.
So a future episode will go into even more detail about it. But for now, just know that a little research goes a long way. And you're usually not going to do super great just by going through one of these general companies that dropships a million different items. That's why Heather learned when she began to specifically look for a vendor related to the product she wanted to sell, she was able to be much more successful. And the profit margins allowed her to make more money, whereas she might not have made money at all if she'd gone through one of these generalist companies, which isn't usually a great deal.
So if you want a private label, if you want to drop ship, if you want to do something totally different, it may not happen exactly like that for you. But if you listen to these stories that I tell you every day, you will see results. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. We'll have to say hi to you at sidehustleschool.com. You can send me an email. You can write me on social media using
side hustle school as the hashtag. I want to make sure you are well supported as we go through this year and work on your hustle. I'm Chris Guillebeau this is side hustle school, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode.
