Bikini Model Creates Multi-Million Swimsuit Line

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

[Music]

Greetings and welcome back. This is "Side Hustle School." I am your host, Chris Guillebeau. Fun fact from yesterday's episode on professional snuggling. When I was writing the notes, my autocorrect changed "snuggler" to "smuggler." Now, those are not the same thing. So maybe in the future, we'll look at a professional smuggler.

Let me know if you have a good story out there. But for now, for today, totally different story, we'll look at a former model who used her industry contacts and social media savvy to launch a high-end shopping site and take on the big swimwear companies. [Music]

In her mid-20s, Candice Gallack was working as a model, staying busy with shoots for agencies throughout South Florida. While she had long dreamed of being a model, she began to realize she wasn't just fulfilled being in front of the camera. What excited her perhaps even more were the brands she was modeling, particularly the swimwear.

She was obsessed with the styles, the colors, the fabrics. As she delved further into those high-end brands, learning about them, tracking them down, she noticed that several of them weren't sold online, and that's when inspiration hit. Candice decided to leverage her passion for swimwear to launch an e-commerce website, selling those brands and telling their stories as a side business. Based in sunny Miami, Candice figured she had a strong niche market and a high demand for swimwear on her side. So she used her contacts in the fashion industry to beg and plead with local Miami Beach companies to let her sell their swimwear.

She was turned down more than she was accepted, but she remained undeterred. Her dream at this time was that her side hustle would eventually allow her to work from anywhere and give her more free time to travel the world. Candice spent a few months setting up a Shopify store and sorting out trademarking before launching her online platform called Bikini Luxe in May of 2014 from her living room table. After the store went online, she was at her first professional baseball game, watching the Miami Marlins, when she heard an unusual chime from her phone. It was, in fact, her very first sale from the new store.

She celebrated right there with her boyfriend and their friends over hot dogs and plastic cups of beer. Once she had had more sales and knew she was onto something, Candice doubled down. She invested $15,000 of her own money into inventory, developing an app, and advertising. And she also invested lots and lots of hours. She focused on brands that were not selling online and others that had only a small web presence.

Sales and customers grew rapidly. Early on, Candice realized she had positioned herself at the intersection of two very competitive industries, e-commerce and swimwear. And somehow she needed to find a way to stand out from the pack. To do that, she took to social media. Now, Pinterest was originally one of her strongest channels.

She invested in advertising with them. And as a result, Bikini Lux received two to three million impressions a month. She also used the unlikely platform of LinkedIn and even boosted her sales by 20% after she posted a controversial bikini picture that led to 50,000 views and 500 comments. Those experiments led to Facebook advertising, which is now her primary means of getting new customers. And once she figured out social media, everything snowballed.

The business quickly outgrew her living room and was upgraded to a warehouse, providing shipping worldwide. Candice made a couple of other smart, intentional decisions. The swimwear business is seasonal, with most brands and websites experiencing a big decline in sales as the winter months draw near, but Bikini Lux managed to quadruple its sales in its first December. This was partly because Candice invested more in advertising in Florida, where swimsuits can be sold all year, and also in Australia for the Southern Hemisphere summer. She also decided to start being pickier about the brands she featured.

She focused heavily on selecting those with strong missions, not just the ones with the best profit margin. So for example, she chose to partner with a swimwear brand that employs single moms and a jewelry line that helps vulnerable women gain valuable skills to make a living. Less than three years after starting, Candice's Bikini Lux Hustle, which is much more of a company now, has more than 450,000 social media followers. And the annual sales of Bikini Lux are close to $5 million. At that level, not everything is easy.

Her challenges include working 18-hour days of what was supposed to be a side project and is now a full-time job, and dealing with credit card fraud and occasional customers who order thousands of dollars worth of product only to return it. But still, Candice is 29 years old. Just as she invested $15,000 in the project, once it looked to be profitable, she believes these 18-hour days are another investment in her future, and she looks forward to seeing where this project will take her next. She still dreams of traveling the world, but for now, this is her primary goal and focus. [Music]

Side Hustle School listeners, you know, sometimes your project changes along the way.

You don't necessarily know what's gonna happen. You have a goal, but then you may reach that goal sooner than you expected. And then you realize that your vision could actually be a lot larger. Or maybe not. And maybe you just choose to keep it small, and you choose to keep it on the side.

Well, your choices are your own. There is more than one path to side of social success, but I hope you enjoyed this story. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you wanna see the show notes for today's episode and learn about Bikini Lux, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/108. And speaking of social media, if you like the show, give us a shout out on Twitter, Instagram, or whatever social network you like best.

You can tell people to subscribe in iTunes. You can send them directly to the website, and just use the hashtag #sidehustleschool. All is one word. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau.

I hope to see you tomorrow. [Music]