This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey everybody, what's up, friends, listeners, community. Welcome to Sada School for the past almost 1,400 days. That would be 1,398 to be precise. So 1,400 coming up in, I don't know, approximately two days. I have been bringing you daily stories, case studies, tips, tools, a bit of guidance perhaps, but mostly just trying to provide a space for everybody out there who is hoping to create more freedom for themselves through the form of an income-generating business.
When I say income-generating business, I really just mean something that you make money at apart from your job. So it's not so much about being a full-on entrepreneur. Many of our listeners go on to do that. Many of our listeners don't, but all of our listeners at least have the goal or at least united in the goal in the belief that it's good to create more options for yourself so that you're not dependent on a corporation, on a government, on an organization, or really anyone other than yourself. Like my goal is to help people become more self-reliant so that they can do more of what's important to them.
Now, this is Throwback Thursday. Once a week, we're taking a little bit of a, well, I guess it is a throwback. Where are they now? Looking at someone that we featured a long time ago on the show and saying, "What has changed? You know, what has gone well?
What has not gone well ever since?" So today in our latest feature, we'll hear from one half of a married couple who started a side hustle selling minimalist backpacks. Minimalist backpacks. This is a social good business that works to reduce food and security in the US. Now, in the original episode, we looked at how they were able to get going with a manufacturing business. So it sounds like it could be, you know, kind of expensive.
A manufacturing business producing high quality backpacks. These aren't cheap knockoffs. There's a lot of craftsmanship that goes into it. High quality backpacks in a range of colors and styles, and their total startup costs were just $4,000. Now, $4,000 is not $100.
It's not $0. But when you think about everything that could be involved in starting a project like that, obviously they were able to be quite frugal and use the resources that were available to them. So it has been now more than two years since we first profiled Adventurous Backpacks, and a lot has happened. So let's hear directly from Kelly. As I said, one half of the team.
I will come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Kelly from Denver, Colorado, and I'm the co-owner of Adventurous Backpack Company along with my wife, Matilda. Adventurous was previously featured on episode 522 of Side Hustle School back in 2018. At Adventurous Backpack Co., we design minimalist backpacks with a cause. For every backpack sold, we provide 25 meals to families in need across the U.S.
Since Adventurous Backpack Co. was featured on the show back in 2018, Matilda and I have both transitioned to running the business full-time. So now we're both full-time employees and owners of Adventurous. Before I switched, I was actually working as a real estate agent, but also directly before I was working as a Lyft driver, and Matilda was a nanny. We've been fortunate enough to get our backpacks into urban outfitters.
We've been accepted by Feeding America into their enterprise society. We've expanded our website, adventurousbackpacks.com, and we've been fortunate enough to have our backpacks featured in Outside Magazine, Forbes, Travel Channel, Woman's Day, PopSugar, and more. I would say that as many businesses are experiencing the setbacks from COVID-19, right now that's obviously a big factor in a lot of our decisions and options moving forward. Since a lot of our retail sales to stores, universities, and events have slowed way down since the pandemic, we've chosen to focus on e-commerce and direct-to-consumer sales, which is really the only avenue we have completely in our control. And so we've worked a lot on making our website, adventurousbackpacks.com as a user-friendly as possible.
And it's actually ended up being kind of a blessing in disguise because we're now learning how to increase our sales online on our website, since that's the only thing we're able to do, which will be even better once all the craziness ends and we're able to continue supplying retail stores and universities with backpacks again as well. There are always downsides to owning a business with all the freedom that it allows. Being able to create your own schedule, go out on hikes and take photos and do something different every day, there's also the pressure to make money because it's a business. And if you don't sell your product and you're not able to make money, then it's not gonna be able to grow or continue. And so there's definitely a fair amount of stress.
You try to find ways to cope with the stress, but it definitely can be there. Say you have a, like, if we have a slow week of selling backpacks, we can be like, "Oh no, what's happening is the..." You can have a tendency to almost overreact, but the truth is as long as you don't panic and you kind of just put in the work necessary, even if things are slow at the beginning or even if something goes wrong, there's always a way to overcome that and continue doing what you're doing to make it work. - Thanks so much, Kelly. Thanks as well to Matilda, the adventurous backpacks team. Now listeners, I always wanna encourage you, do the thing that is available to you.
When an obstacle presents itself, sometimes you can choose to attack it head on, or you can say, "Okay, this is a pretty big obstacle," such as COVID-19, and this is affecting my main strategy, or it's affecting a lot of what I could do, let's say. A lot of things are outside my control. So what could I do instead? And for the backpack team, like focusing on retail stores wasn't a great strategy for 2020. They began with trying to build more retail, wholesale relationships, et cetera, but then obviously it became quite apparent that that wasn't going to work so well for most of this year.
So they changed it up and began paying more attention to their e-commerce model. Now in the future, retail may become more important again, but the time and attention that they have focused on e-commerce is going to only help them then. So do the thing that is available to you. That's my encouragement to you and to myself as well. I think there's always a good thing to think about when you're stuck, when you encounter those obstacles, what can I do now?
So much is out of our control. What can I do that is within my control? I will leave you with that today. 2020 is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, well, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
You can also learn more about adventurous backpacks at, well, don't be surprised, adventurousbackpacks.com. That would be adventurous, like IST at the end. I'm going to link it up on the show notes page as well. sidehustleschool.com/1398. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in the world.
Take care of yourself. And I hope you'll keep listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
