Lifestyle Brand Stumbles on Kickstarter, Scores at Local Markets

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

Over the past couple years, and telling you different stories every day, I've told a lot of stories of big crowdfunding successes. I've talked about Indiegogo campaigns that have brought in $200,000 or more, Kickstarter campaigns that did $50,000 in two days. All that is fine and wonderful, but what about a failed one? Like a failed crowdfunding campaign, because after all, they don't all work. You can often learn as much from a misstep as you can from an achievement.

In fact, this is a characteristic of successful people. They don't just accept failure and give up entirely. They absorb the lessons from it, they ask themselves what they could have done differently or better, they try to understand that they can only influence what's within their control, and then they regroup to try again, or they try something different. You look at the information that you've gained, the data you've acquired, and you say, "Okay, what's next?" All right, so it's always about getting back up and asking yourself what is next. In today's story, by the way, welcome to Side Hustle School.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. In today's story, a textiles designer who sells tote bags and pillow cushions reclaims control of her new brand by drawing on inspiration from everyday objects. When her crowdfunding attempt falls short, she does a post-mortem and then gets back to work. Lifestyle brand stumbles on Kickstarter, scores at local markets. That story is coming up in just 30 seconds.

We get our ideas for side hustles or any other projects from different places. Sometimes they percolate for a while, just waiting for us to take action or leave them behind. When Mari Allen of Paperhouse's design, her idea was centered on two values, control and purpose. Mari studied textile design at the University of Dundee in Scotland, then moved to London. From there, she freelamped with small textile companies, but the bouncing around from client to client never gave her a real feeling of ownership over the projects she was working on.

She was also tired of creating designs for licensing deals and just following trends. Mari wanted every part of her process, from creation to production, to be ethical and sustainable. So, in late 2016, she transitioned away from that line of work by getting into artist development and teaching. Shortly after, she took a full-time position as a lecturer at a Scottish university, where she now teaches art, design, and textiles. Mari started her side hustle because she wanted to take back the control on what she designed.

And now that she was teaching, she was determined to lead by example. But what would she offer? Well, her vision was to design and sell lampshades, tote bags, cushions, and cases, what she called ordinary objects. Total startup costs were just about £1,000 or $1,240 US dollars, covering product sampling and marketing. Part of that went into building her website, which serves as the cornerstone of her online presence and an online shop.

Those everyday objects are based on everyday inspiration. Mari takes it all in, observing the aspects of life that seem commonplace to most people that the average eye might just skip over. Her current collection, Signals, launched in 2019 and draws inspiration from electric posts and the wires running over our heads. But paper house design is not just about turning the average into something beautiful. For her, it's important to design and produce her collections ethically.

That's one of the reasons why she started this side hustle in the first place. So all of paper house design's silk products are printed by a family-run business in Scotland. The cotton products are printed in England by a company that cleans the water used in the process before its return to the source. From there, everything is printed and sewn by Scottish locals. A big vision, but all this work didn't happen overnight.

Mari spent months researching options, sampling solutions, and visiting suppliers who could help make her vision of an ethical creation process come true. Here's what we're going to focus on today, she also had to be willing to adjust. Because back in March of 2019, something happened that would have killed most side hustles. She launched a Kickstarter campaign with much enthusiasm and it flopped. You see, lifestyle brands often use Kickstarter campaigns as a sort of pre-order tool to gauge interest in their product.

The theory is if you get a lot of interest there, your product idea is validated and then you can expand into a bigger market. So when the campaign for Mari's new collection failed, that meant the end, right? There wasn't enough interest in the product to justify a full run or even spend much time on it. Maybe she should chalk it up as a passion project and get back to focusing on her day job. But that's not what she did.

Though the Kickstarter campaign only brought in about half of its goal, she kept going. About a month after the campaign ended, she wrote about it all in detail on her website. Not to dwell on the failure, but to share what she learned from the experience and what she could have done better. For example, she realized she should have spent more time on media outreach. She also could have improved some of the copy and language around the new collection to make it more interesting and attractive.

Despite the setbacks, she finished work on the collection, found vendors for her production chain and she took the smaller offering to a local makers market in Scotland. And the response there was overwhelmingly positive. Marie even had to start taking pre-orders for sold out products. She found her market with this in-person and local event, gave her a determination to keep creating that her Kickstarter campaign hadn't. Moving forward, she entered a creative accelerator program that helped her develop more business skills.

It also showed her how to focus on selecting the right opportunities in the first place. In the early days of paper house design, Marie felt like she had to pursue every opportunity. And if she didn't, she'd miss out forever. She now knows that she can't berate herself for saying no to things and instead celebrates what she's accomplished thus far. As far as the profits go, Marie says they're better than expected.

She made her startup costs back in less than a year and she's looking to eventually open a makerspace where she can work alongside graduates and other artists. So what kind of lessons can you take away from a failure, a flop, a misstep, a misadventure, something that just doesn't work out? Maybe one of the first things is to remember that not everything is within your control. So you want to focus on changes that you can make. You want to look back and say, okay, here's something that I could have done differently that might have resulted in a different outcome or a different result.

There's all kinds of stuff that's not within your control and not just looking back but also looking forward. You can't have a strategy that relies on something outside your influence. In other words, you shouldn't say, well, you know what, next time I'll win the lottery. That's my strategy. You want to make sure you focus on things that are within your control.

Just like in this story, Marie realized that she should have done more media outreach, which is within her control. You can't control what the media is actually going to do, but you can control the fact that you're going to write to 10 journalists or you're going to reach out to X number of people and such and such a publication or you know somebody who works for this online outlet. You're going to talk to them. You're going to ask for some tips or some connections, like these are the kinds of things that you can do. And honestly, the path to regrouping in these situations or the path to moving forward, as I said, a characteristic of successful people is that they use failures or missteps as learning experiences.

So you should dream, you should do, you have an idea, you take action on it, then you gain some information, you evaluate, and then you move forward. You change things up, you do something different, just like Marie's doing, just like all the other people I tell you about every day here. These are characteristics of successful people and I want you to be successful too. And of course, I mean by your own definition of success, not my definition, not anybody else's, but what it means for you to feel good about yourself, to have all the money that you need, to be able to have a life that you want, not be in debt, not feel burdened by something, whatever it is, whatever your definition is, that's what I want us to work toward. Okay, that's my pep talk.

That's my encouragement. It is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1,027. Come and learn about paper house design or anything else I mentioned in the episode. And by the way, thank you so much for listening.

You're awesome. I make this program for you and I'm glad you're out there. More is coming up. Be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.