Nurse Relieves Stress, Earns Cash from Custom Cookie Cutters

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

[Music]

Hey, hey, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. It's your host, Chris Guillebeau. Another new story for you today. Nurse relieves stress, earns cash from custom cookie cutters.

Guess you could say this project is anything but cookie cutter. Well, actually it is all cookie cutter, which is confusing, right? Specifically, that's the topic. It's not just a figure of speech. Trading scrubs in a stethoscope for baking sheets.

This RN, who now works remotely for a medical device company, also sells custom cookie cutters. She's evolved and adapted as she's gone along from cookie decorating classes to more of an e-commerce model, which is a big part of what we'll analyze in this story. Now, let me just kind of state something really obvious. I want to give a big shout out to everybody in the medical community, healthcare providers of all kinds, everyone who's been making so many sacrifices for the greater good. I have so much respect for all that you do.

I can't say it enough. I could probably do a 10 minute episode just saying thank you. So if you're in that field, I am pretty sure you've been under a lot of stress. And I just wanted to say, thanks for all you do. All right, so shout out to you guys.

And here's a shout out, a lesser important, but still meaningful shout out to our sponsor. And then I'll tell you more about this nurse who relieves stress from custom cookie cutters. [Music]

Registered nurse, Chelsea Rael, was looking for a way to express her creativity. She spent her days assessing potential problems with new products for a medical device company when she stumbled on some cookie decorating videos online. After watching a few, she thought, I can do that.

And so far, her journey has been anything but cookie cutter. She posted her first two sets of cookies on a personal Facebook page and offered to teach friends and neighbors. From there, she offered to host a couple of private classes starting in June, 2018. For those classes, Chelsea would make cookie samples showing what her students would be decorating. She provided all the supplies, including six cookies per person and all the icing in the correct consistencies and colors.

She brought practice sheets and taught people how to pipe smooth, clean lines on paper before graduating to actual cookies. Remember, safety first. After a series of gradual price increases, it was time to shift to public classes like a paint night event, except with blank cookies instead of blank canvases. In February, 2019, Chelsea hosted the first of these at her home. She promoted it with a $50 ad on Instagram, targeting women who liked to shop in her area because she figured they were the type of women who were into girls' night out and would be okay with spending a little money to do it.

This time, she charged $35 per person and it sold out with 20 people. For the next two months, Chelsea did two or three classes per week on top of her day job. At one point, she had to take a break, but she was back in time for Christmas because she's one tough cookie. These classes were difficult to scale. To be both personal and effective, the class size couldn't be too large.

So next, she decided to try offering a cookie artist subscription box. She curated cutters, stencils, and other decorating tools and supplies. These come through the mail each month, along with some online video tutorials. Chelsea spent $40 setting up her first website using Crate Joy, and she launched the box mostly using Instagram while on vacation with her family. She needed 10 orders to be able to purchase items wholesale and got 11 orders the day she launched.

To celebrate, they went out for ice cream because I guess they had enough cookies at home. But wait, there's more. The box was a success, but Chelsea noticed that the cost of cookie cutters, even at a wholesale rate, was cutting into her bottom line. So she invested in two 3D printers at $800 each. She used an iPad, the Procreate app, and Fusion 360 software, figuring out how to print her own custom cookie cutters.

And these were so popular, she decided to sell them as a standalone item. Customers could even request their own designs, which Chelsea would then print on demand. Despite the printers frequently breaking down, she doubled her income in two months after making this change. She now markets sweet sugar star cookies, primarily on Instagram and Facebook. Many of her new customers are coming from interactions in cookie-related Facebook groups.

Yes, those exist. Are you not on them? You should join. For now, she's putting a pause on her classes because she's pregnant. She's also taking this opportunity to focus on increasing box subscriptions while prioritizing her health and family.

Not a bad decision at all, especially in this day and age. Next, she has plans for a quarterly digital magazine where she can share business tips. And she wants to expand her classes to webinars, along with buying more 3D printers to keep up with demand. Chelsea hopes this business will eventually become her full-time gig. Drawing new cutters and decorating cookies combines two of her favorite things, baking and art.

[Music]

So I like stories like these because they show this evolution, this transition from making a small amount of money to making a more sustainable income. It's not just about the amount of money, it's about the business model, okay? Because just imagine that you want to bake cookies. Okay, you can bake cookies unless you're gonna scale this up and get a co-packer and go all in, you're probably not gonna make a fortune baking cookies. All right, so Chelsea starts with baking cookies, then she does this cookie-baking class thing, first just on Facebook for friends and neighbors, then making it a bigger deal, charging the whatever it was, 30 or $35, but then eventually moving to this point of selling cookie-baking accessories.

Now this is the kind of side hustle that I wanna encourage you to pursue. One of the reasons that I started side hustle school is because a lot of people were thinking of side hustles just as baking cookies. Nothing wrong with that, I love cookies, go and bake them. But if you wanna make some real money, in this case, the money is not in the cookie, it's in the cookie cutter. If you listen to more stories in the archives, you'll probably get lots of other examples of people who start with something that seems accessible but then grows into something that maybe they didn't imagine at first, they didn't know there was a need for it, they didn't realize, oh, I can do the same amount of work but make more money because I'm building a sustainable business.

So start wherever you are, but always think about what is the next level iteration of my idea. I'll leave you with that to ponder today. Our show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1198, 1-1-9-8. Congratulations, Chelsea, shout out once again to everybody working in the healthcare field and wherever you are in the world, be sure to take care of yourself and look out for someone else. All right, my name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.

[Music]

From the Onward Project.