This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not, in fact, more. That's the principle behind Failure Friday, a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Very excited to bring you the podcast every single day.
And I particularly enjoy working on these stories for this particular segment. There's so much honesty and vulnerability, and I don't know, shall we say, realness in these stories that come from founders, side hustlers, small business owners, and many people that we featured in our archives of more than 1,700 episodes so far. Now, these stories tend to vary. We've been doing them for a few months now, but they often begin with an idea or an assumption, something that they thought, the person thought would happen, and then what really happened, because there was often a gap between those two things. And of course, what they learned.
Today's short story features Joseph O'Bell from Austin, Texas. We told a successful story of his cork sunglasses business on episode 1053, 1053. And specifically, Vineyard Sun is a lifestyle sunglass line for people who love wine and vineyards. So if you like wine and vineyards and sunglasses, well, Vineyard Sun, I suppose, is the ultimate Venn diagram for you. Now, like several of our e-commerce sellers have learned when you depend on an overseas supply chain, you are also somewhat dependent on someone else's calendar.
It's shocking how that works, right? Well, let's hear from Joseph about something that went quite wrong and caused lasting harm to an important client relationship. After his story, I'll come back briefly to wrap us up. [Music]
Hello, my name is Joseph O'Bell, and I'm the founder of Vineyard Sun Sunglasses based in Austin, Texas. And I'm gonna tell you about a disaster story that I had with my company.
Our company makes sunglasses made of bamboo with a wine cork finish. And we sell our sunglasses online on our website, as well as some, we have some vendors that are wineries, vineyards, and different boutiques around the country. We actually have one in Europe as well. And one time, we were placing an order for some sunglasses for a client we have that's a vineyard based in Washington. They reordered some sunglasses.
Our supplier is based in China. And at this particular time, it was kind of at the beginning of the company, and I didn't have a lot of experience getting shipments from China. We placed an order for this particular client, and it was time sensitive, it needed to be to them at a certain date. And we didn't realize that it was around Chinese New Year. And long story short, there was major delays due to the Chinese New Year.
Our supplier in China told us that, you know, it's typically almost for a month that people shut down and are just not working around that time. And so I just kept on it trying to push them to move our production quicker. And our client was getting restless. We almost lost that particular deal. You know, it took over a month, a month and a half to get our shipment in and then over to our client.
And after that, you know, that particular client didn't order from us anymore. And as a lesson learned, you know, we just something unique kind of think about, look at all different angles when you're putting in a particular proposal or deal with your supplier. And that's something I'll mistake on never make again, but there was a pretty bad situation for us 'cause it was a really good client that we don't have anymore. And they were just very upset about the big delay from our order. And lesson learned is just try to think of all different angles of a problem.
And in this particular case, you know, we didn't see this one coming, but you know, you just ask as many questions from your supplier as you can about timing and do the best you can. [Music]
Thank you so much, Joseph. Really appreciate you sharing that honest story. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is in fact the theme of failure Friday, but also, you know, not everything can be recovered.
So sometimes, you know, as you just heard in that story, there can be lasting damage to a client relationship or to another relationship because of something that went wrong. And that thing that went wrong may not even be entirely your fault, but hopefully you learn a lesson through the process and, you know, at least try not to repeat the same mistake. Listeners, if you'd like to check out Joseph's website, it is vinyardsun.com, S-U-N, vinyardsun.com, or check them out on Instagram @vinyard_sun. If you have a question or a comment for us, an update about your side hustle, perhaps, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for tuning in today.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow. Much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
