What It's About
A duo sell blinged out pendants after getting some traction with Instagram.
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
After receiving very little social media traffic, Chris “decided to go old school” and started giving away the pendants for free to people with a lot of followers, on the off chance that someone would pose with it on their social media account. This slowly started working. Now instead of getting 5 likes on a post he’d get 50 or more likes and was finally getting a handful of orders coming in.
Fun Fact
Lisa Loeb was the first celebrity that Chris approached about wearing his pendants. When she actually responded that she’d like a Hello Kitty pendant, Chris knew he had to get this right. He created a custom Hello Kitty with Lisa’s glasses and a guitar in her hands. Lisa loved it, and Chris credits her star power with helping to launch his business.
Notes from Chris
Episode 138
Today’s hustle story is a two-for-one. It begins with Oliver Calaminus, an IT director for a law firm in Florida. One day in 2015 very shortly after the social network Periscope launched, he was watching a channel and saw a guy showing off some flashy wooden pendants that he handmade and sold. The company was called BigHead Custom and when Oliver saw them he immediately wanted to know how to get one. When he asked the guy what his website was, he learned that he only sold through his social media channels, mostly Instagram and Periscope, and billed through PayPal. When he heard that, Oliver immediately saw an opportunity. As a web designer, he could make this guy a website, so that BigHead Custom could take orders online. Oliver used a free template on Shopify to get the online store going. He did some research on SEO, but for the most part stepped back and let Chris do his thing on social media. With the new website, Chris didn’t have to take orders over social media or via phone calls anymore. As he put it, “I could get orders while I was sleeping, which created a noticeable increase in sales and decreased the amount of time I was on the phone.” In 2015, with the website up for only about half the year, they cleared $40,000 in sales.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Big Head Custom: Learn more about Oliver, Chris, and their blinged out wooden pendants on their website
- Periscope & Instagram: The two main social media platforms that Chris used to promote Big Head Custom
- PayPal: The money exchanging service Chris used when he started to accept orders on social media
- Shopify: Oliver used Shopify to create the Big Head Custom website, and they're offering a 21-day trial and exclusive discount for all Side Hustle School listeners!
- Elementary School Teacher Pans for Gold in New Zealand: After changing continents multiple times, an elementary school teacher finds true love, settles down in NZ, goes panning for gold, and ends up making $40,000/year working mostly on the weekends.
- Hand-Stamped Feminist Jewelry Earns $25,000 Side Income: She’s loud, she’s proud, and she’s wielding a hammer to smash the patriarchy with her hand-stamped feminist jewelry line.
ANNOUNCEMENTS: A new show is starting called Happier in Hollywood, featuring Gretchen Rubin’s sister Elizabeth. It’s a podcast about how to be happier, healthier, saner, more creative, more successful, and more productive in a back-biting, superficial, chaotic, unpredictable, and fundamentally insane world. It has the benefit of being both funny and interesting, and you can subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Inspiration is good; inspiration combined with action is better. Now get back to work! Yours in the revolution,
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