Florist & Sculpture Professor Make Presidential Lip Balm

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

[Music]

Hey there, welcome back. This is Side Hustle School, and I'm Chris Guillebeau. Wherever you are in the world, I hope your day is starting well or ending well, or I suppose it could be somewhere in between. Today, I have another story for you that is a team effort. I hope you enjoyed yesterday's story about a hip hop pendant partnership.

Today's is about a florist, who's also a sign language interpreter, but teams up with a sculpture professor to make presidential lip balm, in the former hometown of Abraham Lincoln. That story right after this. [Music]

Today's story comes from Megan Lucky in Springfield, Illinois. Megan is a licensed sign language interpreter, and also a florist. Her side hustle is making all natural lip balm.

She runs this with her business partner and former teacher, Kara Coffel, who teaches sculpture at McMurray College in nearby Jacksonville. The project started by accident in November 2014, when Kara wanted to make lip balm as Christmas gifts, and convinced Megan to help her. On the way back from visiting her parents, she searched on Pinterest for lip balm recipes. Then she ordered small amounts of each ingredient on Amazon. Megan and Kara started playing around in Kara's kitchen, and found that it wasn't that hard.

Before long, they were making batches of about 25 lip balms, and giving them away to people they knew. Their friends and family liked them, so Kara and Megan ordered tubes and more ingredients, and decided to charge for them to cover their costs. As you might suspect, they quickly went from making these lip balms for friends and family for free, to charging to cover their costs, and then deciding to try selling them more widely. Kara had a friend in Jacksonville, who had heard that a local coffee shop was changing locations and renting small shelves. Megan then sent a Facebook message to the owner, and asked if they could try selling their lip balm on consignment.

She agreed to try it, so Kara and Megan created labels for their new business they called Serious Lip Balm. They then started selling it at vendor fairs, and they built their first website. At one of those vendor fairs, they met the buyer for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and gift shop. Remember, this is in Springfield, Illinois. This woman, the buyer for the gift shop, liked the lip balms and wanted to put them in her shop, but there needed to be some connection to the former president.

She provided Megan and Kara with copies of Abe Lincoln's favorite desserts. They went back to their kitchen and matched their scents to those. These new flavors included Mr. Lincoln's lemon pie, Mrs. Lincoln's white cake, and Honest Abe's gingerbread.

The first order for the gift shop was 150 balms, which they delivered to the museum on a Thursday. By Monday, they were reordering and placing orders for Gettysburg and Ford's Theater, two other Lincoln-themed museum shops. All along the way, the business kept growing in their spare time as they continued to work their day jobs. I mentioned they started in November 2014. That year, they made just 57 balms for the six weeks at the end of the year.

In 2015, they made close to 4,000 balms, and in 2016, they made more than 40,000. In the early days, Megan and Kara placed a bet with each other that they could sell $5,000 in lip balms, and if they did, they would get matching tattoos. Well, they now have matching tattoos. When they first bought their lip balm tubes, they bought 25. They now buy them 10,000 at a time.

Three years in, they have also now contracted with an accountant and web designer, and they work with a rehabilitation center in Jacksonville that provides assistance and employment to people with disabilities. They work with people there to help make and label the balms, and that gives them a chance to support their local community. Megan says that it's sometimes been a challenge to be mindful of the business while working their other jobs and looking after their families. Megan has a 14-year-old son and Kara has a three-year-old son. They spend a lot of weekends filling last-minute orders or attending trade shows.

Megan says, however, she sees a positive to this as well. She says it has to be leaving some kind of impression on these boys to see their mothers making a business out of nothing and hustling their hearts to make it happen. Now that the Lincoln lip balms are selling well without a lot of marketing, their next goal is to partner with a tattoo shop to make a post-tattoo balm. [Music]

Well, the next time you're in Springfield, Illinois at the Abraham Lincoln gift shop, make sure to check out Lincoln's Lemon Pie Lip Balm, or of course, you can also go to seriouslipbalm.com. Now, I love how Megan and Kara grew this project completely organically, just starting it as something for their family and friends, and then slowly and steadily building up to those more than 40,000 units they sold last year.

And I also appreciated Megan's balanced comments about how she feels this affects her family. As you're building your project, if you have kids, or if there are kids in your life, like nieces and nephews, consider involving them in some way. Maybe they'll be interested in it. Maybe they'll want to help out, or maybe they won't care at all because they're kids, but you never know what the long-term influence could be. In my life, I can look back when I was a kid, there were a lot of things I ended up learning, even though I didn't really know it at the time, or I didn't care about it at the time, they ended up helping me later on.

So I grew up with the values of independence, self-reliance, determination, and years later, I ended up going to every country in the world, and doing a bunch of other fun stuff. So that's just a little side note. Take it or leave it as you see fit. Either way, as always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration, combined with action, is so much better. For every single episode, there are detailed show notes, including links to anything I mentioned in the episode.

You can always find them at sidehustleschool.com. You can also follow me on Instagram at 193 countries. That's 193 countries. That's how many countries there are in the world, by the way. I'll be back again tomorrow with another great story.

Know that I am cheering you on. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]