This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to Failure Friday. My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're here. I started this segment because I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more.
In fact, over the years, I get all kinds of emails and questions from people who say, well, it's great to hear all about these success stories, but what about the projects that don't work out? Or what about the struggles along the way? And I actually tried pretty hard in most of the stories to talk about what goes wrong, but the team and I decided, let's make a whole segment about it. Let's share a collection of short stories, all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. So just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you'll hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground.
They're gonna tell you a quick story of something that went very wrong. These stories will vary, but often they're gonna start with an idea, a vision, and what they thought would happen. And then vision meets reality, what really happened, and of course, what they learned along the way. So I applaud their courage. I've really been enjoying the stories we've had so far.
I've got some great feedback from listeners, so I hope you have enjoyed it too. I will share some of my own failure stories at some point. I've got no shortage of those myself, but I wanna keep the focus on our side hustler case studies. So today's short story features Sarah from Los Angeles, and we told a successful story of her natural deodorant on episode 509. A natural deodorant that actually works brings in $5,500 a month.
Now last year, she just so happened to be branching out into hand sanitizer before the pandemic started, which you might think would be incredible timing. But as you might also guess, not everything went according to plan. So let's hear from Sarah about that process, her vision, what happened, and what she learned. I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
- My name is Sarah, and I'm the founder and CEO of Curie, a clean body care brand based in LA.
At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we were coincidentally working on our next product, our hydrating hand sanitizer. There was a huge sanitizer shortage, and we were able to fast track our production and get our sanitizer launched five months early. We put the hand sanitizer up on our website for pre-order in May and received over 500 pre-orders. We were thrilled. Unfortunately though, I was overly optimistic and there ended up being huge delays in manufacturing.
We had promised our pre-order customers that their orders would ship before Memorial Day weekend. Well, it turns out we didn't even end up manufacturing the sanitizer until the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend. I was willing to do anything though to get those pre-orders out when I had promised. Our warehouse where all of our orders normally ship from is in Connecticut and our manufacturer is based in Southern California. So instead of waiting for the sanitizer to ship all the way from California to our warehouse and then out to our customers, I had the brilliant idea to just ship all the pre-orders out myself.
I drove over to our manufacturer, loaded up my small sedan with boxes and boxes of hand sanitizer and drove home to my one bedroom apartment to pack and ship them out to our customers in 90 degree LA heat. I know, it sounds like an insane idea and it was. I spent six hours with my colleague in 90 degree weather with no AC, packing up orders so that we could ship them by Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Finally, we finished right before the post office closed for the weekend and schlepped garbage bags and suitcases full of orders to the post office. We came home and poured ourselves a big old glass of wine.
And then to my horror, I realized that the USPS shipping labels for all the orders had been calculated with the wrong return zip code. Our warehouse, which is in Connecticut, was the one that was automatically used rather than California. And therefore, all 500 plus shipments had the wrong shipping cost. I was mortified. I did not sleep.
What's worse is the post office was already closed for the holiday weekend. So I just had to sit with that realization all weekend that all of those orders would likely get returned and have to get processed by our fulfillment center, which likely would have taken weeks. It was the worst weekend ever. Turns out the USPS was overloaded at that time. So we got extremely lucky and only a few orders out of those 500 got returned for insufficient postage.
But I swear the stress of that weekend added years to my life. My lesson, anything that can go wrong likely will, especially when it comes to manufacturing. So always allow some buffer in your plans and your timeline. It's in everyone's best interest to under promise and over deliver. [Music]
Sarah, thank you so much for sharing that story in all of its detail.
It's just wild to consider all the things that can happen once you move forward with an idea. And ultimately many of those things are going to be positive but they might be challenging along the way. So I really enjoyed that story. I was on pins and needles, wondering what was gonna happen with the post office. So listeners never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
That's the theme of this new segment. I'm grateful to Sarah as mentioned, check out currybod.com to learn more about the natural deodorant and other products, including the hydrating hand sanitizer that is now actually in stock and shipping from the appropriate zip code. Again, that's currybod.com, C-U-R-I-E-B-O-D.com. If you've got a question for us, if you want to update us about your side hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for joining me today.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
