Dachshund-Loving Duo Designs Doxie Apparel

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Well, hello there friends, listeners, community. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. Got a good story for you today about a Dachshund loving duo. Dachshund as in the German wiener dog. This story is actually much more about two dog lovers, but Dachshunds play a big part of it.

These two dog lovers create and grow a wiener dog themed brand that now provides a six figure income. As part of the story, you're also gonna get a couple of tips on using Instagram polls and why Facebook ads can help you go to the next level once you've got an initial success in your side hustle. All right, so stay tuned. You're gonna hear about Dachshunds. You're gonna hear about those two tips.

I think maybe something about being a brand ambassador as well. All kinds of stuff coming right up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Claire and Chris Wolfson experienced a sudden health scare with their beloved Dachshund Bean. After experiencing paralysis in his back legs, Bean was able to have serious and seriously expensive back surgery and then make a full recovery. It was a traumatic experience for Claire and Chris, but Bean's strength inspired this designerly duo to create something in his honor.

They originally wanted to design and develop harnesses to support back health and dogs prone to injury, but without specific knowledge and training, they felt intimidated. So instead they decided to use their apparel and graphic design skills to create a series of knit beanie hats called Bean Beanies. Chris developed their logo while Claire helped source beanies and even sewed on the custom labels. At this time, they were both working full-time corporate jobs while selling Bean Beanies on the side. It was just a fun project with low startup cost.

They spent $10 a month for their online shop and then a few hundred bucks for initial inventory. That first year in 2011, they made around $1,000 and tapped into a niche audience they didn't realize would be so supportive. You see, the Doxy community, as it's known, is vast and tight knit. That first thousand bucks made Claire and Chris wonder, could they build this brand beyond beanies? Well, the short answer is yes, they could and they would, but let's talk about how.

While they were getting Bean Beanies off the ground, Claire quit her full-time job to explore a master's program. Quickly realizing that it wasn't the right choice, Claire quit the program and then focused on some freelance work to fill the gaps. By the way, quick side note, there may be some times in higher education when it's good to keep going. If you're in your senior year of high school, for example, might as well see it through. But I believe if you're in grad school, you've already had a lot of education and you start to realize like this program might not be good for me, then you should just leave.

You shouldn't think too much about the sunk cost. You should think about what it would cost to stay in that program for another year or two years or whatever it is. I have known far too many grad students who are just profoundly unhappy and they'd be much happier if they did something else. Again, just a little side note, I have a master's degree myself, but I'm not sure what it was really worth in the end. We'll save that story for another day.

So for Claire, freelance work wasn't always consistent. She found herself with an abundance of free time as well as some uncertainty about how to fill it. She finally decided to focus on what was now called bean goods full-time. She dove in expanding their product assortment to include graphic tees, tanks, accessories for doxies and their owners. Chris, who was still working full-time, created additional product designs.

And that year they made $16,000. How did they jump from $1,000 a year to over $16,000? Well, the new products helped a lot and Instagram also played a big part in driving traffic to their site and establishing a dedicated group of fans. All of this work really started to pay off the third year when they made over $93,000. So $1,000, $16,000, $93,000.

That was the moment when Chris decided to quit his full-time gig to focus on bean goods along with Claire. With his dachshund-loving duo now dedicated to their own business, the next couple of years, 2015, 2016, they consistently made over $100,000 annually. In 2017, Claire wanted to push profits beyond what had seemed like a bit of a plateau. So she decided to take an online course in creating Facebook ads. This was a game changer in expanding their reach, growing their audience, and driving new traffic to the site.

And if you're in a similar situation, wanting to go beyond that plateau, she has a couple of tips for you. First up is it's important to learn how to target certain Facebook pages that have similar interests. This is especially helpful when your audience is so niche, like dachshund-lovers. And then second, she learned to use Instagram polls by showing a couple different designs and then asking which one users liked best. They were often surprised by the results of those polls, and they would use the results to decide which one to produce.

It's essentially instant feedback to decide how to invest in inventory. With the help of that course and those improvements, bean goods made over $150,000 in 2017, their best year yet. Now, of course, the money is great, but the best part of the experience for Claire and Chris is definitely the freedom. Freedom from the Sunday night anxiety of dreading their day job, freedom to learn new skills to invest in a project they made, and freedom to have some alignment or balance between their work and the rest of their lives. Four years in, it's still just Claire and Chris running bean goods full-time, but the next steps for the business include exploring the idea of hiring a virtual assistant.

They're also shifting their shop from big cartel to Shopify because they've been looking for more features, more SEO capabilities, and social functionality. But getting back to where we started, Bean the dachshund is still doing well, and he now has a brother named Van. Claire assured us that both dogs are actively involved in executive decision-making, and all around, their business is barking up the right tree. [Music]

All right, congratulations to Claire and Chris, as well as Bean the dachshund. Couple of good lessons in their story, and there's one more thing I didn't mention.

One of the strategies that's been successful for them is they've kind of founded this group of social ambassadors for their brand. So the doxy-loving community is tight-knit, as I mentioned. Anybody who has a dachshund feels part of this tribe. And so some people who purchased multiple products for them or otherwise connected on a deeper level, like a true fan, they can apply to become an ambassador of the brand. And Claire and Chris will send these ambassadors free products once in a while.

These ambassadors will then wear the t-shirts or whatever it is, they'll take a picture and post it on Instagram using the hashtag, tagging the Bean Goods account. And I said this is something that's really helped them to reach new customers, bring more people into their world, follow them on social and potentially order products. So I thought that was interesting, and I also like this concept of using an Instagram poll to put forward two designs and asking their fan base, which is large and active, hey, which one of these do you guys like better? And I think when you do that, the most interesting data comes back when there is a big gap between responses. Like if you show people two designs and it's kind of split, you know, a lot of people like one, but a lot of people like the other, I don't know if that's that helpful, but if you put something forward and you think both designs are equally good, but when you show them to users, you know, it's 80/20, 80% of users prefer one over the other, then that is significant.

I recall this experience we had with the side hustle book. If you've seen the cover, the yellow cover with the motorcycle and sidecar with a bag of money in it, that was something that really surprised us, both myself, my literary agent, the publisher. We had another design that we thought was better, and we did some polling, both with my own community and also with this random house panel that they have. So in other words, people who have no association with me at all and the results were really surprising because both in my own community and in that panel that didn't know me at all, there was a huge preference. It was something like 70 to 80% among both men and women, different demographics for that cover with the sidecar and the money bag.

So we're like, okay, we're not gonna argue with that, basically, we're gonna go with that choice. So we could talk about this more another time, but the short version is just because you think you have the best idea for a design, doesn't mean that your users will agree with you and their opinion matters, especially if you're selling t-shirts that they're supposed to wear. So a good idea to put these polls out and then make instant decisions based on the results. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. As always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

If you'd like to see today's Dachshund-loving show notes, just come to sidehustleschool.com/488. That is for episode 488. I'll be back tomorrow, 489 coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.