Aerospace Apprentice Soars to Seven-Figure Sales Heights

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

I thought a bit about my childhood and adolescence when I was working on this story, not because the protagonist goes to jail for stealing a car, not because he burned down a tree or a house or anything else, that's a whole other story, but because there's a connection between aerospace and selling on eBay, the aerospace industry in particular. Both of my parents were aerospace engineers, my dad and my stepmom, but I followed the path of selling on eBay, which of course led to lots of other things that came up later. In this story, an eBay experimenter expands his Make Your Own Fashion products into a multi-brand e-commerce empire. He's an aerospace apprentice who soars to seven-figure sales heights. He actually goes on to earn millions of dollars from selling t-shirts on eBay, which is still possible, and we'll talk about that. So here we have a lesson in scale and

paying attention. I'll give you some practical tips at the end of the episode on how you could identify a market in which this could work for you, because here we are, 20 years on, online auctions can still provide a lot of opportunity for people, especially as they're getting started. I love this industry because anyone can start right away and see some initial success very quickly. Yet, as you'll hear in this story, it's also the kind of thing that can scale, at least for some people. So I'll tell you all about how this works.

It's coming up in just 30 seconds. Many people dream of working in the aerospace industry. If you aren't up in the clouds traveling to your next destination, the next best thing might just be creating the machines that get us there. But for Ed Snelson, who landed an apprenticeship at Airbus UK with a year left at university, flying dreams were simply not enough. Ed had also participated in a UK program called the Young Enterprise Scheme, which aims to teach young people the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and career advancement through real life practice. After

learning some of what could be possible, Ed just knew that he would work for himself one day. From his childhood bedroom at his parents' house, after he spent 8-10 hours during the day at his apprenticeship, he would come home and spend another 1-2 hours a night learning everything he could about selling online. He soon decided that the easiest way to enter the ecommerce space would be to start selling products on eBay. But what was he going to sell? Well, he noticed that many sellers on eBay were listing items they found around the house, at flea markets, or while shopping vintage thrift stores. But

since Ed was already working a demanding full-time job, he didn't have the time to source items from so many places. So instead, he focused on a different market. He began selling printed t-shirts, which he designed with a unique twist. The shirts included funny one-liners and engaging sayings that could be personalized for the buyer, by adding their name or another distinguishing feature. This immediately made his inventory more interesting. At first,

he sold them individually off his personal eBay account, and he even surprised himself when he made a sale on day one. Within a few months, he knew he was on to something. Demand was growing, and so was his confidence, so he invested a few hundred dollars into branding an official eBay store. This gave him a more professional look in a sea of other sellers doing something similar, which then boosted sales even further and allowed him to reinvest more. He also realized that he was missing out on a large part of the potential profit by paying screen printers so much, since each personalized item had to be custom produced.

So he used his earnings to purchase printing machines and shipping equipment, taking over almost all of the production. It was a lot of work and a big upfront expense, but it saved him constant recurring expenses in the future. From there, things took off. Before long he was working six to seven hours a night after finishing his full-time job. Of course, this was ultimately unsustainable. Within a year, Ed was making as much money from the

side hustle as he was in his job, and he knew it was time to quit so he could focus on one thing. Plus, he was finally able to move his base of operations from his childhood bedroom to his very first office. Now it felt like a real business. Once he was able to put all his attention on his eBay store, monthly revenues increased. He went from a few thousand dollars a month to up to $10,000 a month. He was able to offer more designs, produce larger orders

with a quicker turnaround, and reply to queries faster. It was all the same work he had been doing before, but now he just had more time to do more of it. This new income gave him the extra money he needed to expand to other platforms, including Etsy and Amazon. This led to a problem and an opportunity. While selling through the other platforms was great for low-cost marketing and traffic, it didn't give him a great opportunity for repeat customers.

People identified with a larger site, like Etsy or Amazon, not his smaller storefront. So they would always go back to Etsy or Amazon instead of coming to him. Ed solved this by creating websites for his storefronts, with brand names like Make Your Own Garments for apparel and Myog Prints for accessories and home goods. To bring in customers, he included note cards with all of his purchases from the larger platforms, directing satisfied customers to the sites and offering a discount for their repeat business. With all these different storefronts and a team of workers now running production and shipping, he registered a new business, Signature Printing Limited. His goal was to bring everything together under

one umbrella company. Unfortunately, this brought a whole new set of headaches he was not expecting, including a large tax bill that he hadn't planned for as his business had scaled so quickly. Additionally, he found that the systems he had for storing and marketing products worked well while he was overseeing everything, but beginning to work with larger e-commerce platforms and providers meant that he had to go through his entire inventory to make everything uniform. It was a lot of work, but of course he was up for it. This started about five years ago, and in 2017 he won an eBay Business of the Year award after growing at an incredible rate of 20-45% per month. By mid-2019 he had cleared 1.4

million pounds in sales, with a forecast to sell 2.1 million pounds in 2020. That is about $2.5 million. As he has continued to grow in sales, the business basics have remained the same, providing high-quality personalized apparel and gifts to customers who want something a bit more special than general bulk items. Having perfected a process that scales, Ed also likes to help other brands who are just starting out. He does this by offering advice and warehouse services at a lower rate than many competitors do. It's important for him

to give back to the industry that helped him realize his own dream of working for himself. This former aerospace apprentice has come a long way from selling t-shirts in his childhood bedroom. Alright, so as I said, a lot of what Ed is doing now with this multi-million dollar business, a lot of what I started 20 years ago selling online, which was not a multi-million dollar business but was still pretty exciting to me when I was 20 years old and found a way to make even $20,000 to $30,000 a year selling online when I had no idea what I was doing, a lot of this stuff is still relevant. These strategies and tactics, this whole business model in fact, as I said, is available for people to jump onto now. And interestingly, some of the challenges that Ed faced as he scaled up kind of point to an opportunity for someone who's just starting out. And what I mean by that is Ed's just

starting out in his childhood bedroom, but then it turns into a real company. He's got offices and staff now. He's doing his own printing and production and so on, which obviously has advantages. But all of a sudden at the same time, he is now a company. And so all of a sudden, the roles have kind of reversed, whereas when he started out, he's like this scrappy guy kind of producing stuff independently. He's an artisan, he's a maker, et cetera. And

then of course, now he's the company, which doesn't mean that he is like this big, bad corporate villain or something. But it does mean that somebody who is just starting out, who is independent has advantages of their own. So I always point that out because people think, "Oh, but it's such a big company. How could I compete?" Well, he competed from his childhood bedroom and with some of the advantages that you would have now if you were doing it. Now, here's a practical tip before I go. I always encourage people who are interested

in this kind of thing to go to sites like eBay and pay attention to the closed listings or the completed listings. Look at what has already sold. There's a way to filter your search results to just see closed listings. And the reason you want to do that is because if you see everything that's open, that's interesting in some ways. You can see inventory that's up, you can see what people are currently bidding and so on. But if you look at completed

listings, it helps you understand a lot more about what is actually selling. What is actually selling in terms of the volume and in terms of the closing price, if it's an auction model. Now, not everything is an auction model, but still, you can look at see what is being sold. That tells you a lot more about demand. That tells you a lot more about what might be a good market to go into. And so many years ago, this is what I did when I was like, "Huh,

what else should I sell? Oh, I noticed that a bunch of people are selling these Lego sets." Okay, that's interesting. They're not just listed for sale, but a lot of people are purchasing them. And in some cases, they were purchasing them for prices that were a lot higher than what I could just go and buy those sets at the store for, right? Which is really crazy in some ways. But again, this whole concept of retail arbitrage is still quite relevant.

So consider those independent advantages that you might have and go and pay attention to completed closed listings. Some practical tips for you there to go along with what I think is an inspirational story. Of course, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action, that's so much better. Thank you so much for listening, my friends. Today's show notes. All right,

sidehustleschool.com/971. That's right, today is 971. So we have, what? I don't know, approximately 29 episodes to go until we hit 1000. I'm so glad you're along for the journey. Once again,

my name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.