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What It's About
A couple goes to a baseball game and comes away with a profitable side hustle.
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
In Bob's words, "Some of the best ideas are the ones you stumble on to." Your idea doesn't have to be huge and outlandish. Side hustles are everywhere, and some of the most successful ones involve people working with what they know or selling to a community they already understand. If there's one thing "Ballpark Bob" understood, it's baseball—and he never really hoped to build a business around selling baseball sweaters. It just kind of happened.
People are really passionate about sports and the teams they support. They want to show their pride and loyalty, and it becomes a tribal affiliation. Being passionate about sports almost always requires that you spend money, so there’s very little resistance to marketing the right product. With their baseball sweaters, Bob and Barb found an untapped market right there waiting for them.
Fun Fact
While neither Bob nor Barb had any background in manufacturing sweaters, they did understand there was a market for them. The rest they just figured out as they went along. They saw an opportunity to introduce their product to an eager baseball fan base and Ballpark Sweaters was born!
They started with an order of 200 sweaters from a Chinese manufacturer. It seemed like a reasonable number: not too many, not too few. The first sale came at the very next ballgame when Barb wore the new prototype and walked around the parking lot outside the stadium. Two women who were tailgating bought sweaters right there! Within 45 days, they’d sold the rest of that initial order and then placed another, making a few adjustments based on what they’d learned from the first batch.
