This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Chris Guillebeau here, your host of "Side Hustle School." Thank you so much for tuning in today. This is our weekly segment known as Throwback Thursday. Every week, conveniently on Thursdays, we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Now, we have been producing this show for more than 2,000 episodes, so we've got all kinds of great stories in the archives to pull from.
Last week, we heard from the owner of two businesses in New York City, a clothing line and a fashion boutique that features 25-plus BIPOC owned brands. Now, today in our latest feature, we're gonna hear from Brett Johnson. He is the creator of Fire Drops, an organic throat lozenge with cayenne pepper. I just feel like you need to say that with enthusiasm. Fire Drops, you know, because it has cayenne pepper and it's just strong, powerful, yet also healthy.
What's happened since? Well, let's see. First of all, Brett created a couple of other products. He made honey hots and elder embers. These have a bit less cayenne pepper for people who might be intimidated by, wait, what is it?
Fire Drops. Okay, that's enough for me. Let's hear directly from Brett. [Music]
My name is Brett Johnson. I am located just north of Boston in Massachusetts.
The name of my side hustle is Fire Drops. And I was originally featured on episode 9-0-1 of Side Hustle School. Fire Drops, which is an all natural organic throat lozenge with cayenne pepper. It's really effective at treating colds, flus, sore throat symptoms, and just helping you kind of feel better all naturally. It doesn't have any of those typical medicines or dyes or anything like that.
It's an all natural organic, certified organic product that is intended to soothe and heal sore throats naturally. Fire Drops really started because we wanted to come up with an alternative to what we saw in the marketplace, which was a lot of menthol cough drops and remedies that weren't really all natural. When we first kind of came up with the idea for a cayenne pepper solution, it was really six or seven years ago. Nowadays, you've got natural remedies for almost everything on the market and organic products for almost everything on the market. Back then, it wasn't so much the case.
And so in the health and wellness category in particular, we were kind of sick of seeing all these lozenges and cough drops loaded with menthol and red dye number five and all these other random, weird ingredients that we didn't necessarily want to be putting into our bodies on a regular basis. And we found that cayenne really works and it was a natural way to help us feel better. And we wanted to bring that to the market. Fire Drops is sold primarily online at this point for our website, firedrops.com, also through Amazon. But then we also are carried in about 50 or 60 small retailers across the country.
A high concentration of those retailers are in the New England area, just being that's where we are. But those are really national throughout the West Coast, California, Arizona, and the middle of the country as well. So a lot of small, local mom and pop grocery stores and organic food stores and then online primarily. So our biggest challenge to date is one that kind of recurs for us and rears its head in a lot of different ways. I would say it's the seasonality of the business, right?
Primarily being focused on cold and flu. Certain times of year are slower than others. So as you can imagine, when the weather gets warmer and there's not quite as much cold virus and sore throats and things like that going around, we can see a pretty significant dip in sales. And that just creates cashflow challenges. But I'd say more than anything, we've learned or seen a lot more in the last year or two, the need for us to focus a little bit more exclusively on direct to customer sales.
We've had great partnerships with our distributors and with stores across the country, local retailers. But those sales are obviously at a much lower margin. And so the higher margin sales with customers just allow us to be more bold with our manufacturing, hopefully invest in some sustainable packaging and things like that, but also invest in new product lines. So bringing three new products to market with firedrops and honey hots and elder embers was quite a tax on our financials. And this has been a business that's been completely bootstrapped to date.
So I think at this point, we're really looking for, one, to kind of boost our direct to customer sales to capture that additional piece of margin so we can continue to scale the business with speed because with wholesales, it's really just a little bit more of a slow burn. And then two, looking for investors and partners that can help us scale the business more quickly 'cause we're into this now four or five years and we're growing, but we're growing at a pretty slow rate. And so I think we need to really get some capital infusion to speed up the process and kind of keep our manufacturing on track. Anyone who's wanting to start their own business, particularly in like a consumer packaged goods space, I think the best advice that I got early on was do things that don't scale very well. As you're testing out the product and making sure there's a product market fit.
I was so obsessed I think when I first started this with efficiency and really keeping a tight rein on our cash flow. And I think early on, you kind of just have to do things that maybe don't scale super well in order to make sure that the market is going to respond to the product and identify with the product. And so for us, that meant for a long time, we were packaging containers of our product by hand every single one. Now that is quite labor intensive and takes a long time obviously when you've got a hundred thousand pieces of throat lozenges and you're packing 80 at a time into individual containers. That takes a lot of work and a lot of effort.
But what that allowed us to do was run smaller manufacturing batches, take less financial risk upfront and prove out the concept for some of these new products that there was a market for them and that people were gonna purchase them when we offered them to the marketplace. [Music]
Thanks so much to Brent for sharing his updates with us. Listeners, check out firedrops.com, also available on Amazon and in a number of local retailers. As mentioned, he's got a couple of other products now as well. If you like a little bit less cayenne pepper, but hey, I encourage you to try the original.
I'm gonna order some myself. Let me know what you think of this story and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand case studies. We have a legacy of strong content, but I really believe the best is yet to come. Thanks so much for being out there. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions.
And of course, tune in tomorrow for a new episode. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
