Boxing Up the Best of Handmade Nashville

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

In today's story, a brand consultant puts the work of Nashville craftspeople in front of an eager online audience, making some serious cash from the effort. It's actually the work of several friends who work together. This is a subscription box service, at least it started that way, and it has skyrocketed. Just like I talked about in last week's recap, these three friends combine their passion with a key market interest and then applied some simple business lessons to go from a side hustle to a seven-figure brand. That is correct, side hustle to seven figures, all on just $100 in startup costs.

I love stories like these. It just goes to show what is possible out there, so many different opportunities, so many ways to do something you love while getting paid for it. And not just getting paid for it, but making people's lives better at the same time. Just so many good things here. So we're going to call this story "Boxing Up the Best of Handmade Nashville." My name is Chris Guillebeau. This story is coming up after the shout-out to our sponsor.

How can you take a hyper-local business and make it go national? You focus on the right market, that would be the local part, the right partners and vendors, and the right offer. This perfect match exists in a curated network of 300 small Nashville businesses, all of which were recruited to take part in a massively successful subscription box service, bringing in more than $2 million a year and starting with just a simple website. It's called Batch, and it came to be through the efforts of three friends, Sam Davidson, Stephen Mosley, and Rob Williams. The three friends appreciated the quality of handcrafted Nashville products, from kitchen to bath to cabin, but couldn't find a one-stop shop to gobble up these goods.

They decided to create a subscription-based e-commerce hustle that was booted up without needing much of a boot. Again, they had almost no startup costs because they pre-sold subscriptions. So the cash was already there before they purchased any inventory. And since they came from marketing and branding backgrounds, pitching the products and designing packaging didn't require any outsourced help. The batch name came from their first subscription packages, which offered four Nashville-made items each month.

The partners were surprised when they hit 200 subscriptions right away, and then 600 the next month, and 1,000 after that. One key that unlocked a bigger cash box was a subscription recipient asking about how his company could send Nashville-centric gifts. Voila! The birth of the corporate gift option, which soon went from an afterthought to their primary business model. But hold that thought and the afterthought. Let's look more at the actual boxes.

Lucky recipients might get packages that include chocolates, popcorn, shortbread, toffee, coffee, pancake mix, honey, bath and body goods, or a Nashville-labeled hand towel. All high quality, all with handsome packaging, and all locally produced. There's also a build-your-own-batch option if you simply have to have pickled asparagus with your bourbon cherries and some homemade marshmallows thrown in. The corporate options include the specific company's branding on boxes and cards and gift wrap. After pairing that corporate component with offering a la carte items, which was also a result of customer inquiries, the three friends opened a retail store stocked with the full range of Nashville's finest handmade goods. That's correct, the three partners

went from subscription service to actual retail store. Not that it's all been easy. The brand has struggled over time with financial planning. And the fact that a lot of the goods are seasonally produced and sold makes cash flow and long-range forecasting a bit murky. However, all the partners having day jobs in the early days let them develop the business in ways that were as organic as many of the products.

What started with the small mailing list has evolved into publishing stories on local Nashville events, maker profiles, and event listings, plus partnering with their product purveyors for giveaways. Early on, they discovered that the Nashville maker community is closely connected, a fact that helped them expand their customer base and bring on new vendors that they call partners. In fact, Sam says that kind of partnership is essential for success. He advises not regarding vendors as merely part of a supply chain, but thinking of them as true partners, especially for a local business like this. And that mindset means their partners are motivated to provide quick turnarounds on products and do co-promotion that benefits everyone. Working with batch has even helped

some of those partners go from side hustling to full-time business, just as the service itself has. Now, at some point in the process, the partners learned a key fact. 90% of purchases were gifts. Recipients, in fact, end up buying something for a friend or client. So that whole cliche about the gift that keeps on giving, it really is true.

They now have plans to improve their systems to scale, looking at replicating the Nashville model in other cities. So if you've got a hankering for hot chicken crackers, or perhaps some artisanal beer bread mix, you might want to request a box from batch. All right, lots of good stuff in this episode. I really enjoyed the notes for this story as well. We just learned a lot from working with batch. So thanks batch team.

And this is a really key point here. Batch has determined that 90% of purchases are gifts. Right? I mentioned that in the episode. So they're actually going to discontinue their subscription offering at the end of this year after doing it for several years.

And basically, it's because they're just paying attention to their customers. They're paying attention to what their customers want, which is essentially more a la carte gift options. And they've also found that there's more profit margin in that as well. So good for them. They're paying attention, being strategic about what and how they sell.

I also like this part about partnering with their suppliers and vendors, not just thinking of them as companies, but as friends, partners that we're all in this together. If they do well, we'll do well, and vice versa. So that works particularly well in a subscription-based business or a gift business, as we might call it now with batch. So check them out if you're interested in anything Nashville related, or if you just want to see how they've been able to grow this business, as I said, with almost non-existent startup costs to something like $2 million this year. I find it inspiring, so hopefully you do too.

But remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. What are you doing for yourself? What kind of project are you building? What are your ideas for 2020? Because it's just around the corner. Today's show notes are at www.sidehustleschool.com/10831083. That's episode

1083. I'll be back tomorrow, of course. Much more is coming up, and thank you for listening. Take care of yourself during the holidays and every day. I hope you'll come back tomorrow.

My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project