This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, oh my gosh, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau. We are at the end of the year. I can hardly believe it.
I can't believe how the time has gone by, et cetera, et cetera. But you know, you feel that way too, right? Every year this comes around and I'm always like, what happened? How did we come to December? How did we come to the end of December?
Well, however it happened, apparently it happened, time marches on. I hope you've had a good year just in case you haven't. Well, guess what? The year's gonna start all over very soon. So I hope next year is fantastic.
We'll talk about that more a bit in the days to come. For now, welcome to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment where we take a look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. We're on a string of great stories here. Last week we heard from the founder of CutBuddy, a tool for home haircuts.
Really took off during the pandemic. The week before that we had the soap making adventurous who goes all in on a squeaky clean side hustle. She's also doing quite well. Today, in our latest feature, we'll hear from Luke Pierce. He is the chief radical and co-founder also, but that's his title, chief radical at a British family business operating in the US and elsewhere called Radical Tea Towels.
These tea towels promote historical progress and modern messages of change. We first featured Luke back in episode 956 and he was on track to do a million dollars in sales, a million dollars a year in sales of tea towels. So I'm telling you, we got some really talented folks out there doing awesome, interesting projects. But that's enough for me. Let's hear directly from Luke, the man himself.
He's going to give us some updates and I'll come back at the end with a brief wrap up. [Music]
I'm Luke Pierce. I'm based in London in the United Kingdom and I run a business called Radical Tea Towel. And I was featured in episode 956 of the Side Hustle School. Well, actually it's not a side hustle anymore.
It's my main job. It's a business selling English made tea towels, British made tea towels featuring designs inspired by radical history. And radical history is everything from the founding fathers who went against the monarchies of Europe, right the way through to the 1934 textile workers strike, which was the biggest labor union dispute in US history up until that date. Everything in between, a lot of stuff from the sixties and more modern things as well. But we're generally focused on history in the US.
That's generally in the 19th century. In the UK, it's a little bit broader than that. My day job before doing Radical Tea Towel was working as an operational manager on London Underground in London. So we run the train network that operates underneath your feet when you're walking the streets of London. I had great fun doing that.
I was there for six and a half years. And crucially for me, I learned a lot about management and about dealing with other people. So even though some of the technical skills just weren't relevant to what I was doing selling products online, there was a lot of the people side of things. And I think also just building up my confidence as well. I think when you start out in your career in your early 20s, I mean, certainly I really knew nothing about the world.
And that job taught me a huge amount. I think it gave me the confidence later on to go out and do my own thing. Since we were last featured on Side Hustle School, there's been a pandemic, a global pandemic. And initially that was really scary for us. We saw orders drop off on the site.
Sales were going down and we thought, this is it. This is the moment when finally our business is tested and is found wanting and we have to go back to our day jobs. And within a couple of months, things turned around. Suddenly it's like people rediscovered. Oh yeah, we can still shop online, even if we are locked up at home.
So they came to our website and started shopping and that was fantastic. We also decided there was a big global, people forget this, but there was a big global face mask shortage at the time. You just couldn't get them anywhere. And so we spoke to our manufacturers in the UK and we said, hey, what happens if you just like use tea towel material to make face masks? Because coincidentally the World Health Organization had said that tea towels are one of the best materials for homemade face masks.
So we started making face masks as well. And for a while they were very popular. So we had a kind of fantastic year, both from the point of view of growth, growing the brands, expanding our product range, improving the bottom line and expanding our ability to help other people as well, which is something that's always been close to our hearts. Since then in 2021, I think things are coming back down to earth a little bit. Sales have dropped, almost inevitable, given the return to normal with the economy, I guess, for online businesses.
We've struggled especially in the US as well with the changes to Facebook advertising, which was always a big part of our growth. So Facebook advertising has just become less effective in general. So where you're trying to find brand new customers, which we mainly were in the US, it's just way more challenging. Whereas in the UK, we had a lot of our existing customer base to fall back on in our email list as well. But we're starting to kind of turn a corner on that.
We've seen volumes go up a bit so far in October. So we're feeling very optimistic. And we just had a whole load of new designs drop as well for the year. So we're certainly very, very confident and hopeful going into the final quarter of the year, Christmas, which is always our busiest. What advice would I give to someone following on my footsteps?
Well, I hope no one will be following in my exact footsteps because I quite like the fact that we don't really have any competitors out there. That's helped us over time. We seem so niche and so obscure that nobody dares compete with us, which I love. So my advice would be stay well away from anything to do with tea towels or radical history in general. In terms of more usable advice, I suppose there's many things that I would say to people.
Some of the realizations for me recently is remembering that product drops, launching new products and new designs, are their own form of marketing as well. So even if you're not paying for ads and stuff, if you have an email list that you've built up, the material to talk about with them is just, "Hey, we've launched this new design, we've launched this new product." So try and spread that throughout the year, be always launching new stuff, creating new stuff. Yeah, I think it's a fallacy to think that, "Hey, you can set something like e-commerce up and then leave it run, and then it does all the work for you and you can abandon it for years." And then it's still doing just as well for you. No, it's a hustle. A hustle you have to keep on hustling at, right?
You've got to still put the effort in and work on growing it and nurturing it. It's your baby after all. But it's extremely rewarding as well to be able to kind of create something and enjoy the fruits of that. [Music]
Thank you so much, Luke. Really appreciate those updates.
Keep up the excellent work. It's just so cool to see how people can build these businesses in areas that most of us would never, ever think of or expect. And as you heard from his advice there, he's like, "Hey, don't take my industry, tea towels and radical history, but it's so small and so specific, I don't think he has to worry about that." Hopefully it gets other people thinking, what else could I do, right? What is the thing that I can do that's going to take off? I'm going to have an idea, then I'm going to implement, and then I'm going to iterate, as I go along the way and change because other stuff is going to change along the way.
Facebook is going to become more difficult with ads or whatever the factor is. But if you've got the right idea and you're willing to put in the work, there is something you can create. I believe that very much. And our stories are 1825 episodes and counting. Our stories kind of back that up with these real world examples.
So thanks, Luke. Check out his website, radicalt towel.com, or follow them on social @radicalttowel. They are shipping to the US, to Canada, and to the UK at least, if not worldwide. And they've got different messages and different options for each country. So here we are at the end of the year, perhaps the holidays have already passed, but I'm pretty sure they're going to be selling throughout 2022 and beyond.
All right, radical tea towel, thank you. And let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories. If you've got an update, if you've got something for us we should be thinking about for the new year, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you once again for tuning in. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
