Finance Professional Goes Big With Petite Dressing

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

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One of the main reasons I encourage people to start quickly is because often through starting one thing, you get closer to your ultimate thing. Or at least if it's not your ultimate thing, your next thing. Welcome to Sadosville School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Over the past six weeks, I've been doing a ton of interviews for The Money Tree, my new book.

And if you have read it, you know that Jake, the main character, starts off by selling his college economics textbooks. This is something he does initially out of desperation because he's looking to get some extra cash. He's got this challenge to make $1,000 in the next week and trying to figure out what to do. And so I sometimes mention this when people ask, what can I do right now? Or what about those people out there that need cash in the next week?

I talk about reselling your college textbooks or whatever it is that you have in your closet that you're not using. But is that it? Should everyone become a professional reseller? That's sometimes the question people come back with. They're like, okay, but I sell the stuff in my closet.

Then what? It's not that everybody should become a professional reseller. The point is that the experience teaches you something. It often leads to something different. That's what happens with Jake in the book.

You know, he starts with selling his own stuff. Then he learns about selling photography gear that he buys. He buys somewhere and resells it for a higher price. Then that leads him to later start a service, et cetera. So that's kind of what you'll hear about in today's story.

Though it's not about reselling textbooks or photography gear, it's about a New York City woman who starts a fashion business centered around other petite women. Then discovers that her blog is even more popular than the actual fashion business. So of course she makes an adjustment, but she wouldn't have discovered this if she had not started with her initial vision. So short version, start now. Longer version, finance professional goes big with petite dressing.

That story is coming up after this message from our sponsor. [Music]

Investment banker, Chi Lee, went through the traditional route of earning an MBA to work at a bank. She found that the work she was doing, while financially rewarding, wasn't satisfying her creative impulse. Looking for a side project, she decided to market and sell clothes for petite women. As a woman under five feet four, that would be 162 centimeters, she found it extremely difficult to find clothing in mainstream shops, even in New York City.

Expecting that there would be others like her who faced the same problem, she decided that this was the problem she would tackle. Her first step was to set up her own online shop and website using Shopify. This set her back about $500. She could have spent more time and done it for less money, but time was a scarce resource since her job was so hectic. And because petite sizing was difficult to find, Chi Lee knew that sourcing inventory was going to be the most difficult task, but also the one where she could add the most value for her customers.

To acquire initial stock, she called up all the petite brands she knew and visited their showrooms if they had an outlet in New York. A few of these brand owners were happy to let her carry their brands despite her purchasing only small numbers early on. She invested $2,000 on the first batch, a relatively small amount for such a business. But beyond buying and storing the inventory in her apartment, she also reached an agreement with some retailers on a drop shipping model. They would hold the clothing and deliver it only when a customer placed an order.

Marketing her store and getting web traffic was more challenging. Unlike how she secured her inventory, Chi Lee didn't have firsthand experience with digital marketing that she could lean on. She tried running Facebook ads and posting on social media platforms, but these efforts failed to generate even a single sale after hundreds of dollars were spent. At the same time, however, she had also started a blog alongside her store where she answered common questions on petite dressing. How did it work?

How should someone with a petite frame and a pear-shaped figure dress? These were questions she once had, and she knew there were others who were also wondering. As she wrote and shared the posts on Pinterest, she realized she was gaining much greater reach than before. Eventually, her post generated around 2/3 of the traffic to her site, while her Pinterest shares sent the remaining third. This was unexpected since most e-commerce stores were using Facebook and Instagram ads heavily, and Pinterest was rarely mentioned.

But the twists and turns didn't stop there. A year into launching Petite Dressing, Chili saw that the growth of her blog was far outpacing that of her store. The blog was supposed to be a marketing channel for the store, not the business itself. But one way or another, she had to increase income on her website if this was going to be more than a hobby. With all that traffic, Chili started monetizing her blog through affiliate marketing and running advertising for brands.

This also had the side effect of boosting her own store as she started to get inbound inquiries from independent designers who wanted to cater to petite women. On her part, this required a big switch in mentality. As an employee in a traditional industry like finance, the path was clear. She had to do things a certain way with little opportunity for change. But in the world of entrepreneurship, she says you're constantly having to find new ways of doing things, whether it's engaging with customers or generating a new stream of revenue.

That's certainly been true in her case when she moved from focusing on e-commerce to blogging. In fact, she's now started a YouTube channel as well, since she expects video content to only become more prominent in the longterm. In her words, making mistakes is a part of the game that cannot be skipped. Chili never imagined that she would have a profitable blog when she first started to create a fashion business. But now with over 150,000 monthly visitors to her site and $2,000 in monthly income, she's gone big, catering to smaller women on the side.

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So as I said, a great example of when you start something, you don't know where you're gonna end up. You start going down the road of side hustling. You don't know where it's gonna take you, but you won't get to your destination, whatever that ultimate destination is without taking those first steps. So if you're trying to figure out what to do next, if you have any sort of idea, if there's any idea that you've had, whether it is starting a blog or reselling or creating a service, a product, affiliate marketing, a YouTube, but whatever it is, I would suggest you figure out how to do that thing to a basic, minimal level. And then see what comes next.

And that has been the path that we've seen over and over in lots of different stories. A few people do have a vision from the beginning and then follow that vision with very little change or evolution along the way, but those people are the minority. Most of us end up adjusting and adapting, and that's ultimately how we're going to be most successful. I also like this point about how she spent $500 setting up her online shop using Shopify. Now you don't have to do that.

A key message of side hustle school is spend as little money as possible. But I also recognize that as a finance professional in New York City, she had little time, so she chose to basically spend more money and save some time. So there are cases when that can be a good idea. Of course, you have to consider what your time is worth, your overall goals, et cetera, but just keep that in mind. Okay, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

If you'd like to learn more about Chile's blog or anything else I mentioned, just come to sidehustleschool.com/1240. 1-2-4-0. Thank you so much for listening. You are awesome. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

We'll be back tomorrow. The show is called "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.