This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up my friends, listeners, Side Hustle School community. So glad you're here. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now? This is our weekly segment, conveniently happening every Thursday, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
And we have had all sorts of features recently. We have looked at handkerchiefs, energy gum, candles, and a budget bridal blogger. Last week, in fact, we heard from the owner of Sweet Afternoon Bake Shop in Toronto, Canada, who promises us you can have your cake and listen to it too. She doesn't actually eat it because she is a competitive power lifter. So fun fact there.
Today in our latest feature, we're gonna hear from Claire Wolfson in Long Beach, California. Together with her husband and business partner, she runs Bean Goods, which sells Datsun themed apparel for dogs and humans. The original story, Datsun-loving duo designs Doxy apparel, taught me a lot about the world of Datsuns, which I don't know how useful that will be to me in the future. But one of the things I love working on this program is I get to learn all kinds of fun facts. As another fun fact, the designer who works with Claire and her husband, Chris, is Dox Design, who we have featured on the podcast as the graphic designer for Dox.
We had her long ago as a case study, and then also in a Throwback Thursday episode, another one like this, episode 1335. So if you wanna learn about the graphic designer for Dox, go back to those. But wow, you know, what a small world of small dogs. That's all I've gotta say about that. So let's hear directly from Claire.
She's had a ton of updates. They have really, really grown this business tremendously. It's been a fantastic success, and they've made a lot of smart decisions along the way. So over to Claire, and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
- My name is Claire Wolfson, and my co-founder's name is Chris Prouty.
He is my husband, and we live in Long Beach, California, and our business is called Bean Goods, and we were featured on episode 488. We have a direct-to-consumer brand inspired by our 16-year-old Doxon Bean, and we create and sell Doxon-themed clothing and accessories for humans and dogs. Since we were featured on Side Hustle, I believe back in 2018, we have had some huge changes. So our business has actually grown 450% since then, and we are on track to do seven figures this year. So how did we make all of that happen?
We started with hiring a business coach who I've met with every week for the past two years, and who has helped me implement all of the next things that I'll mention. We laser-focused on our profit margins and eliminated any products that were under a 65% profit margin. We got really serious about our marketing strategy, specifically with email, SMS, also known as text marketing, and our Facebook and Instagram ads. We brought on a community manager to help us with our Facebook group that currently has about 4,000 members and is still growing every day. We finally moved our business out of our home and into a small warehouse.
And then this year, I've read some really helpful business books, such as Profit First and EMIF. So the biggest challenge right now that we are facing is finding time to work on the business instead of in the business. So what I mean by that is finding time to do the strategic work versus the daily tasks. So we started with simple products like beanies and tote bags. Also from the beginning, giving back has always been one of our biggest whys.
And we actually initially were giving back 30% to local dog rescues. And that is before we knew anything really about running a business and anything about profit margins and like cost of goods sold and all of that very, very important stuff. You really can't build a business without a support system. In the beginning, I actually worked really closely with the local small business development center. And I felt like that really helped with the basics of getting started and building a fairly solid foundation for being goods.
And then as the years went on, we needed more support. And I hired a business coach. I would say that my decision to hire a business coach has been one of the best, if not the best business decisions I've ever made. A few years back, we were in a bit of a scary place where the sales were coming in, but our bank account wasn't reflecting those sales. And when I first started working with my business coach, we really focused on our margins and getting our business to a more profitable place.
And then once I hired her, things really did start to take off. In the first year working together, our business grew by 80%, which was in 2019. And in 2020, our business grew by 200%. And in 2021, our business is up 220% from this time last year. So yeah, biggest advice is not to wait to get help.
[Music]
Thank you so much, Claire. Really appreciate that update. Thanks for all the details and huge congratulations to you and Chris on 450% growth, on track to seven figures, well, well done. And then yes, just a note for our listeners, it's good to give back, right? But unless your profit margin is really, really good, you probably can't give back 30%.
So a good lesson there that Claire and Chris learned early on. But as you heard, they've been able to do very well and they are still giving back. So what a world we live in. Check out beangoods.com or @beangoods. That's bean, B-E-A-N, beangoods on Instagram.
If you wanna learn more about this incredible world of doxy loving. Now this feature, Throwback Thursday, was one of our most popular new features of 2020. So as you've heard throughout 2021 so far, we're gonna keep it going. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. If you have a question, if you have an update or something else, I don't know, it could be anything I suppose, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
This has been episode 1594. Our notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/1594. Thank you for joining me. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It's completely free.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
