Designer Illustrates Success with Personalized Wedding Products

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Hey there, what's up, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School, today with the story of another side hustle turned full-time business. You heard one of those yesterday about the full-time mom who ships $35,000 a month in frozen bread on Amazon. Today's story is pretty amazing as well. It's about something that starts as an Etsy project by a graphic designer, eventually turning into something making more than half a million dollars a year, actually on track for about a million this year.

And listen, we're not changing the vision of side hustle school. This is very much about starting your project without quitting your day job. And as you know, if you've been listening for a while, I don't actually make this show for entrepreneurs for the most part. Like I know we have a lot of entrepreneurs listening, that's awesome. But I'm really focused on people who have jobs, who have busy lives doing other stuff and are just trying to create something for themselves.

But in both of these stories, yesterday and today, neither of these people had the goal of becoming a full-time entrepreneur, or even quote unquote, starting a business. It was really just about meeting a need in the case of yesterday's story with Stacy. And today's story is more about pursuing a creative outlet. But in both cases, they became tremendous successes. So I think that's pretty awesome.

I think there's something you can learn from it, no matter what your goal is. And I'll tell you today's story in just a moment. [Music]

When Christian Berry first moved to New York City after college, she had secured a promising job with a pharmaceutical advertising agency. She enjoyed it, she made good friends in the process, but New York City isn't cheap. And she found that she still needed extra money to pay her bills.

And she also found herself wanting to exercise her creativity more. Though her job was demanding, it didn't use her creative design skills. And she wanted to keep those honed and fresh. Christian had grown up in St. Louis as the girl who loved art class more than recess.

And she'd always wanted to be an artist. Well, except for a brief period when she wanted to be the first female Major League Baseball player. It turns out that one of those two dreams became a reality. Christian wanted to take her passion for design, something that she says she can do day and night without getting bored, and launch her first hustle. So a few years ago, she gave it a try.

She launched an Etsy store to sell her services such as logo design, illustration, and we'll come back to this, some wedding items. There were practically zero startup costs since she already had a laptop and the software she needed from college, putting a listing on Etsy cost just 20 cents per product. And then of course they take a small fee from the purchase price. Now, once the store was up and running, Christian quickly realized that out of all of her offerings, the wedding products were selling the fastest. Her illustration style, which she describes as modern and bright, also seemed to lend itself perfectly to weddings.

So over the next year, this hustle gradually evolved into what is now Miss Design Barry, an e-commerce website featuring unique designs for weddings and events. Christian's fun illustrations are infused with bright colors and quirky elements, and everything is designed in collaboration with the customer. The products cost from $30 to $900, depending on the item and quantity. Now I mentioned that this is a pretty impressive side hustle. Here's how the numbers break out.

In 2014, Miss Design Barry made $40,000. In 2015, this quadrupled to $160,000. And in 2016, profits shot up to more than $700,000. It's probably not shocking that around this time, Christian decided to quit her job and focus on this project full-time. And so far this year, she's on track to match or exceed last year's results, perhaps coming close to a million dollars in profit.

And Christian says this has been a learning process all along the way. As the hustle has grown into a thriving small business, she's had to master how to manage cashflow, how to advertise online, how to manage the employees she eventually hired, and of course, a lot more. As the sales have gone up, her operating costs have gone up a bit, but still with profits like hers, those expenses are essentially about investing back in the business, protecting what she's built so that it can continue to be profitable, hopefully for years to come. Christian still works from home. She averages about 40 to 50 hours a week.

And in fact, she recently got married herself and answered our questions for this feature during her honeymoon in Thailand. She says she can't stay away. She loves what she's doing so much. Now that she's gone from side hustle to business and she has employees, Christian is now thinking about adding a new side hustle to her plate. I know, not surprising, right?

This time she wants to help other creatives, especially women, get a jumpstart on creating their own e-commerce businesses. Basically, she wants to take them down a pathway that it's safe to say she's already been able to successfully navigate herself. [Music]

So congratulations to Christian. What a wonderful story. And I really like her illustration style.

I hope you'll check it out. She's obviously served a lot of happy customers. And as I said, when I started, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. That's why the side hustle way is so powerful. It allows for a lot of different creative expressions of work.

Even in this story with the success, Christian could have just decided, well, this is working, but I'm just gonna deliberately keep it small. I'm not gonna scale. I'm just gonna set a limit on the number of clients I have or the number of commissions I'll accept or the sales that I'll take or whatever it is. But of course for her, the answer was to dive into it. Once she had that strong response from people and she only quit her job after it was so successful that she knew she could rely on the income coming from the project.

Anyway, a lot to learn from her and her success. Come by the website and check out today's show notes. They are at sidehustleschool.com/178. I've got more stories coming this week, including some from people who have very different motivations. We have an increasingly broad listener base.

And wherever you fall into that mix, whatever your goals are, I really hope you'll find something that's relevant and helpful to you. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. I hope to see you tomorrow.

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