This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. We're excited for today. It is Throwback Thursday.
Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now? You could be listening any day. By the way, it may not be Thursday for you, but our segment is Throwback Thursday. And every week we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Now we're on a roll here because last week we heard from Karen Newport in New Zealand who creates and sells digital paint brushes.
If this is not an archetypal example of the new economy, I don't know what is. I mean, digital paint brushes, an asset for people using the iPad and using the iPad pencil and software called Procreate. This is something that didn't even exist. A few years ago, if you had said this would be a thing and somebody would be out there making a good income from it and now she's going on to teach lots of YouTube tutorials, et cetera, a lot of people would have said, "Well, I'll believe it when I see it." And now it's there. So today in our latest feature, this one is quite different.
It's one of my favorite stories of all time. I actually wish we had featured these guys in the "100 Side Hustles" book. Maybe I'll get a chance to do another photo book at some point. And if so, they are first on my list to call. So we're going to hear today from Lindsay Boblitz, one half of the power duo behind Near and Deer, a side hustle that sells faux taxidermy.
Taxidermy. I'm talking about mounting animal heads on the wall, except faux. It's fake. It's artificial. It's something that she has crafting.
So it has a pretty incredible origin story. We told the whole thing back in the episode, which was, what was it? Episode 471, if you want to go in here more, but I think she touches on it in her comments. So you'll get a little bit of a preview. And we're going to hear some updates from her.
They have been selling out lots of bison heads and such. So let's hear directly from Lindsay. I will come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Lindsay Boblitz, and I'm based in Storristown, Pennsylvania. My husband, Rick, and I are the owners of Near and Deer, and we were featured on Side Hustle episode 471.
Our side hustle is Near and Deer faux taxidermy. We make fake animal head wall decor, deer, moose, cow skulls, and even unicorns, T-Rex, and dragons. Anything you can think of, really. And we custom hand paint everything in any color that our customers can imagine. When Rick and I were dating and thinking about buying a house together, we got into some heated debates over his real deer head mountain collection.
He's a hunter who grew up with real deer heads on the wall, and I am not a fan. I like to see them in hotel lodges far away, where I can't really think about what it truly is. I always feel really bad for the animals. I just can't get past the fact that they're real, and I just feel that it's cool to hang their heads on a wall. So I decided to make a fake deer head.
I bought a resin fake deer head off of eBay and covered it with fabric. Rick wasn't a fan of my fabric choice, but he thought it was a good idea. So I decided to start an Etsy store, and I sold that one that I made in two weeks. So then over the next couple months, I started making more, and I averaged selling about one to two a month, which was great money for me, but Rick thought he could do more with it. So he decided to start hand painting them solid colors, and we ended up selling a higher volume at a lower price point.
So things really started growing after that. My main hustle is I am a business appraiser. I basically tell business owners what their companies are worth, and I like my job. I think it's really interesting, and did not want to quit my job full time to run near and dear. Rick, however, he was an HVAC guy for government facilities, and had a great job, made good money, but just wanted to change.
He was interested in taking the jump to really start growing the business, and I'm happy that he did it. We have grown significantly. When we did our last episode, we were renting a facility down the street, and we had a rented space to make the products, and then a warehouse a couple blocks down the street. So we were keeping our products in one spot. We'd have to drive and pick them up with our work van, drive them back to a different facility and paint them, and then pack them up and drive them to our FedEx pickup.
So it was a very inefficient way of running the business, and it was fine at first, but as we grew, it became way too labor intensive. So we decided to purchase our own warehouse. It's about a 4,000 square foot warehouse. Our biggest challenge is working with a team of people and delegating the roles so that everyone has a say in how the business can grow. We have had several wonderful employees who stuck around with us for years, and they really are focused on either painting or packing, and we haven't really had the time, 'cause we're always so busy, to train and invest money and effort to really bring that person to the next level where they can work on new product spreadsheets and answer customer service questions.
So a lot of those tasks still fall on Rick and myself, and without a large enough team of people to help leverage that work, it's been challenging to help us grow. So Rick and I feel like a lot of the work still falls on our shoulders in the evenings, and we're still working super late, and that's our fault that we haven't been able to train staff and make the time during our busy times. I would suggest that if somebody wants to follow in our footsteps, that they really take baby steps. One thing that Rick and I did was we never took on a big debt or a big loan to get the business started. We did it all in chunks and it was very deliberate about the decisions that we made so that we wouldn't grow too fast and then be stuck with a big loan to pay off.
So what we did was we baby stepped from our basement into our garage and worked our way up to a third party lease and then buying our own warehouse and did it gradually and you only used the space that we needed rather than from day one just going to buy a new warehouse and having all this extra space and maybe not being able to afford it. In terms of our products, we gradually introduced more and more SKUs and we also gradually added different marketplaces starting on Etsy and then adding Amazon Wayfair and on and on from there. Awesome, thank you so much, Lindsay. Congratulations on all those updates. Congratulations on the new warehouse in particular and I was glad to hear as well.
Lindsay also had some notes for us separately about how COVID-19 has actually been a big seller for them. So who knows, I guess when the coronavirus hits, all you can think of is like, I need a dragon or a T-Rex or a moose up on my wall. Listen, stranger things have happened in 2020, I'll say that. I also like what she says about her advice of, take these baby steps and this is the side hustle school way. They could have taken on a loan perhaps, they could have gone into debt somehow and it would have been riskier, it would have been a lot riskier, right?
They would say they've got this really creative crafty idea but now we have all this money that we have to pay back or we are obligated to someone else and they didn't make that choice. So now they're obligated to themselves which is a lot better, a lot easier to be obligated to yourself. It's really obviously not an obligation, it's a privilege. It's an asset that they have created for themselves. So anyway, I'm a big fan of Near and Dear and I'm grateful to Lindsay for helping us out with this segment.
We're gonna keep doing these throughout the rest of the year, they've been very popular. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. We're now at 1,300 episodes and well over 1,000 stories. 2020 is our year of interaction so if you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your hustle, if you would like your own artificial moose head, well for the last one you're gonna go to, Near and Dear. But for everything else, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
We'll be featuring them throughout the year along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. Those show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/1321. Thank you so much for listening. You are a rock star. Go and do something for yourself.
Make some progress on an idea. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
