This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, my friends. Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome wherever you are in the world. I'm so glad you're tuning in today. Thank you so much for sharing these brief moments with me.
Hopefully they're not just brief, they're also helpful. Helpful, interesting, entertaining, informative, maybe giving you an idea for something. Maybe just nudging you along if you're out there trying to start your own money-making project. That's what it's about, how to do that without quitting your day job, without going into debt, and by using a skill you already have. Or perhaps a skill that you have been learning or you're acquiring along the way, which is kind of what our throwback episode is here today.
This is also Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now? Where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has changed since we first featured them. Now, last week we heard from an Irish travel blogger with Type 1 diabetes. She has recently moved to YouTube. Well, she hasn't moved to YouTube, but she's moved her efforts to YouTube.
But she has moved herself into a tiny home on wheels. So that was last Thursday, if I'm not mistaken. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Brian, who is an American living in Spain. And Brian operates a side hustle partnership primarily based in New Orleans. So don't worry, it all makes sense.
The key point here is that this business, Tipsy Pertuti, sells premium cocktail pens. We first featured this business on episode 814, 814. So what has happened since then, more than 800 days ago? Well, let's hear directly from Brian and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
Hi, my name is Brian.
I live in Barcelona, Spain. My side hustle is called Tipsy Pertuti and was originally featured on episode 814. While I live abroad, we sell internationally. Most of our business is in the US though. And we fulfill all of our orders from just outside of New Orleans in Louisiana.
My main hustle is building and running a craft distillery here in Barcelona, Spain. We're called Corpin' Barcelona and we make Corpin' Gin. The process of starting a craft distillery and a spirits brand in a foreign country obviously took some time, years in fact. So Tipsy Pertuti gave me a kind of creative outlet while we were doing the build out in the distillery, waiting for permissions, licenses, stuff like that. We launched several more pins since we were featured on Side Hustle School a couple of years ago.
And we have a grand total of seven pins right now. Most recently, we did a champagne with my campaign pin and that was to raise money for a nonprofit called Fair Fight Action leading up to the 2020 election. All that said, our Negronis from a homies pin is hands down our most popular pin we've done thus far. Some other things that we've worked on, we've streamlined some of our logistics processes and we have several new pin designs on the works. And we're always kind of playing with expanding our offer to apparel or accessories like t-shirts, socks, tote bags, branching out from just doing the enamel pins which is what we've been focused on.
Our biggest challenge like many has been dealing with COVID. Our customers are mostly people who work in the hospitality business and COVID has hit our industry particularly hard. We had a bump in sales while everyone was in lockdown like March of last year. But as the economic realities of the pandemic really started to sink in, our sales definitely slowed. Our brand and our product are, they're fun and cheeky but they're by no means the central items.
So we recognize that. The good news is we built this business to have very little overhead. So times might be lean right now but we've been working behind the scenes to be ready for when things stabilize. Thankfully we're small and agile enough that we're able to adapt to whatever that looks like. And there will certainly be new opportunities when those times come.
I started Tipsy for Tutti while I was working on a six month project in Germany back in 2018. I was deep in the R&D for starting the gym distillery and I saw several enamel pins for sale at a fun design store that was in downtown Stuttgart. I had studied graphic design at college and have had a small button machine since then just for fun projects and odd things here and there. But my wife and I for years had been playing with the idea of making fun buttons like that. The problem was that the price people were willing to pay for plastic paper and aluminum buttons is not very much.
So when I saw these enamel pins in Germany selling for eight, nine, 10 euros, the light kind of came on. And this idea that had been on the back burner for so long now felt much more viable. The timing was right as well. I had a friend working for Shopify who kind of walked me through some e-commerce basics. And I had already done a lot of market research in the spirit and bar industry because of the distillery.
So it felt like the stars aligned. And from that moment, it was six months till we were up and running and selling our first pins. My advice is, and this is a little general but I'll get a little more specific here in a second. But in general, I would say, be brave. It's scary to start a new business, even a small one.
And especially in these uncertain times, but being brave doesn't mean that you are without fear. It means that you're able to push through even when you are scared. So I still get scared every time we launch a new pin, no matter how much research I've done, no matter how many times I've tested it. 'Cause I never really know if it will resonate with people until all the work is done and it's up there for people to buy. So my advice is don't be afraid to try new things, really.
Design small tests that will give you a positive or negative indicators, but don't bet the farm on them. Be smart about your small tests. [Music]
Awesome, thank you so much, Brian. Really appreciate those updates. And this is the kind of business that is pretty simple.
It's the kind of business that's meant to be a creative endeavor, like Brian said. He wasn't trying to necessarily go full time with it. He was doing something else, but this was a great thing to kind of turn his attention to while he had various delays, getting his main hustle up and running. And as you heard, they've had some challenges with COVID, but they're still going. They're still going, designing new pins, shipping them out across the United States and beyond.
So call me old fashioned. Well, don't actually call me old fashioned, but that is one of my favorite cocktails. I thought about it as I was working on this episode. Check out Brian's website at tipsypertudy.com. Tudy is spelled T-U-T-T-I, or follow them on Instagram or Facebook at tipsypertudy.
Now this was one of our most popular features of 2020. As you have heard all throughout 2021 as well, we're gonna keep it going. So let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives. If you have a question, if you have a comment, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. That's all for today, but I hope you'll come back tomorrow.
You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It's all free. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
