Accidental Side Hustle Becomes Decorative Family Business

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

[Music]

Welcome to a brand new week of Side Hustle School. So glad you're here. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Today I have a story for you about an accidental side hustle that becomes a decorative family business. When I say family business, I mean that in this case it employs an entire family.

Also from time to time in the story, I mentioned the importance of SEO. What does it actually mean? Well, technically it means search engine optimization, okay? But it's one thing to know what that phrase means or to understand why it's important, but it's another to know what to do about it. Well, this story includes a simple yet critical tip that you can use now if you sell anything online, any kind of product, any kind of service.

Once the designer in this story made this change, her sales dramatically increased. It was night and day. And now, as I said, it's this family business that's employing multiple members of her family. And last but not least, the business in this story relies on two of our sponsors to run its operations. That would be ShipStation and Wix.

She used Wix to build her website and ShipStation to ship out all these products that she's selling. I just thought that was pretty cool. To be clear, the sponsors don't bring stories to us. They don't have any influence at all on the editorial process. I just like to point out whenever listeners and case studies are finding them helpful.

So thanks a lot ShipStation and Wix for providing resources and free trials that are helping our community. And speaking of sponsors, here's a shout out to one of them. And then I'll tell you the story of this accidental side hustle. [Music]

Jessica Massey was working as a corporate graphic designer and her art was being used for a variety of products, including cards, calendars, and blankets. Many of her designs were ghost designs, meaning they were credited to a person the company worked with who had name recognition or a large social media following.

After years of walking into big box stores and seeing her designs being sold under someone else's name, she wanted to change. So once she had a baby, Jessica left her job and began freelancing. Outside of that freelance work, she was also looking for a creative outlet and a way to make a little extra money. Woodstock Rustic was the outcome, a home decor brand that tapped into the decorating zeitgeist that favors the wood palette aesthetic. There was no business plan, just a way to have some fun and make money, the true definition of a side hustle.

Woodstock Rustic started out in that most mythical setting for American success, the garage, surrounded by yard equipment and not so rustic garbage cans. For her first commercial outing, Jessica took her designs to an art show and made $2,500 in a single weekend. Giddy with early success, she set up an Etsy account for the pieces that hadn't sold. And this proved to be far less successful. That account only saw a sale or two over a six month period.

Before throwing in the towel, Jessica decided to give Etsy one last go. She did some research and learned that she'd made every mistake possible when setting up her page. Jessica discovered the importance of SEO, especially how critical keywords and titles can be. For example, Woodstock Rustic sells a lot of gift items and one of their biggest product lines is sympathy or memorial gifts. Prior to this point, Jessica hadn't really taken into account how customers might end up landing on her page when they started their search in Google or Etsy.

For example, in the beginning, she might've named something a butterfly gift box when she'd actually rank much higher if she called it a sympathy gift box and just let potential customers see for themselves that the theme was butterflies. No one was searching for butterfly specifically. They were entering sympathy into the search bar. After a few small adjustments, orders really started rolling in. It seemed like such a simple fix, but it made a huge difference.

When Jessica first started Woodstock Rustic, it was just her and her mom who helped out with marketing. Once the orders coming in were more than they could handle, Jessica's dad came on board as well. The business continued to grow, so much so that eventually Jessica's husband was able to leave his corporate job to work for the family business too. And around this time, she also hired her first full-time non-family employee. Imagine that your side hustle blows up to such a degree that it outgrows your house.

That's exactly what happened to this family. The home was in a subdivision without much yard space. It was too small for their needs and too close to other houses to not disturb the neighbors with the noise from the carpentry they did. So they moved out and bought a house with some land that had enough room for a home studio. Not having to commute is one of the biggest benefits.

Woodstock Rustic now offers a range of home decor items, including plant containers and kids' room decor that can be purchased through the company's standalone website. Jessica still sells on Etsy, where she has more than 4,000 sales to her credit, but wanted her own site that would be free of some of the constraints imposed by the platform. Rather than the generic mass-produced fake wood items that can be found in many big stores, Woodstock Rustic offers hand-created pieces, including customized work that helps customers put their own stamp on their homes while supporting a small family business, something consumers are increasingly looking for. The business is now so successful that there never seemed to be enough hours in the day. Luckily, the team members Jessica has brought together all bring a unique skill, whether it's marketing, customer service, production management, carpentry, or accounting.

It's the way these skills come together to form a complete picture that creates the overall Woodstock story. Although the beginnings were humble, with just $1,000 in startup costs, Woodstock Rustic now has an annual profit in the low six figures almost four years later. Not a bad return on investment for this homegrown family business. [Music]

All right, great lesson here. When it comes to your product or service or your idea, if you haven't started yet, what are people searching for?

What will they be searching for? What should they be searching for? And then how can you craft your search results, your pages, your accounts, et cetera, to match those terms? In this example, Jessica learned that nobody out there is searching for a butterfly gift box. They don't know they want butterflies until they see it.

When they see her gift box, like, oh, that looks nice. That's the perfect aesthetic, you know, for the memorial gift, the sympathy gift, to honor my loved one, et cetera. But nobody's searching for butterfly gift box. They're searching sympathy or memorial. So it's probably a totally different word or phrase or connection for you, but think about how it applies.

I remember when I first started my blog, the blog was called The Art of Nonconformity, but guess what? Nobody out there is really searching for nonconformity. Nobody is like, hey, I want to find a hub of resources, you know, to help me think differently because I want to be a nonconformist or I want to live unconventionally or whatever. And so I had to figure out over time, you know, because nobody is searching for that, what are they searching for? And I started focusing more on practical tools such as helping people with self-employment, helping people become location independent, helping people negotiate a salary increase, helping people to have frequent flyer miles to be able to go and see the world, just all that kind of stuff.

And then, you know, tying it all together was this philosophy, this manifesto of, you know, you don't have to live your life the way other people expect, but that's the framing of it. That's not what people actually search for. So they find the actual philosophy by searching for something more practical. I guess the bottom line there is always think from the customer's perspective. Don't just think from your own perspective.

Don't think about your butterfly gift boxes. Don't think about your art of nonconformity. Think about what the customer wants. And then think how you can position what you offer to match those wants, needs, or desires. That's my encouragement for you today.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Our show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/954. Come and check out Woodstock, Rustic, and anything else I mentioned in the episode. I'll be back again tomorrow and every day this week. Got a whole set of stories.

Can't wait to share them with you. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sydustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.