High School Student Earns $20,000 Making Wooden Bow Ties

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[Music]

High school student earns $20,000 making wooden bow ties. When a young woodworker receives a wooden bow tie as a gift, he is unimpressed. So he learns to make his own, ends up bringing in $20,000 in a year as a high school student. He then builds this business up, goes on to make a good bit more than that $20,000. And it kind of becomes a big part of his lifestyle going into college and beyond.

So this is a pretty cool story of following a passion or following a skill, a skill and a passion working together to create a pretty significant revenue stream for a young person. And this is part of a series we're doing this year, bringing you some remixes of our early years best stories from 2017, 2018. We started the podcast January 1, 2017, have recorded and produced and published an episode every single day since. So if you were listening back then, if you have an incredible memory, you might recognize a couple of these stories, but each one is being rerecorded. We also include some new updates in some cases.

So without further ado, let's get into today's about the high school student making wooden bow ties for fun and profit. Fun and profit. That's what we're all about. Excited to bring you the story of Paul Castor. [Music]

When 12 year old Paul Castor was first introduced to woodworking, he had no idea how big a role it would play in his life.

Paul's love of this craft came about after watching popular YouTube woodworkers, which encouraged him to continue to push the limits of his abilities. Plugging away at the craft, Paul began to experiment with different ideas. He would scour the web to learn as much about woodworking as he could and developed considerable skill in the process. He learned to make cutting boards, bottle stoppers, and bowls. Once in a while he'd list them on Etsy or eBay or sell them to family and friends.

His first customer was his mom who bought a cutting board from him. Now at a time when most teenagers would develop and pursue new interests, the encouragement Paul received helped him stay the course and he continued working on his hobby. This passion project would turn into something more a couple of years later. Paul had received a wooden bow tie as a gift and he liked the concept, but the tie he received was chunky, unattractive, and poorly finished. From his years of experience, Paul knew he could do better and that's exactly what he set out to do.

He first began by taking a look around in the Etsy marketplace. Most of the wooden bow ties he saw were large and chunky, just like the one he'd received, while others were flat and lacked contour. Paul knew the ideal bow tie, the ideal wooden bow tie at least, would be somewhere in between. He was looking for the Goldilocks of wooden bow ties. He loved the feeling of classic fabric ties, so he crafted a wooden one that emulated this look and style.

Just, well, you know, wooden. And these wooden bow ties took off. The natural search and discovery features of Etsy drove some initial sales and Paul quickly noticed that the bow ties sold a lot better than the other products he'd listed from time to time. In order to keep up with demand, Paul needed to invest in some machinery that would allow him to scale up production. So he turned to Kickstarter, which brought in about $1,500, and that was his first time fundraising, so it wasn't a huge amount, but it gave him some momentum and gave him some funds.

Building on this success, Paul branded his products Crooked Branch Studios and decided to make his own website instead of relying exclusively on Etsy to sell his products. This gave him additional reach. It turned out to be a big tipping point as it directly led to about $6,000 in increased sales. It also gave him additional credibility as he was then featured on NPR's "How I Built This" podcast. Now let's talk more about those financials.

Crooked Branch Studios made $20,000 in profit on the back of $40,000 in revenue while Paul was in high school, just one year of high school, to be precise. He was able to turn woodworking from a passion project to a profitable side hustle without incurring any risk. While revenue held strong, Paul's profits dipped the next year when he made another big change. He went from high school student to college student, but he was smart about this too. He realized he would be better off hiring people to assist him.

Going it alone would only be doing a disservice to his customers, and besides, he needed to study at least once in a while. With three private contractors and two manufacturing partners, Paul now managed to sell over 2,000 wooden bowties, prices that typically range from $40 to $50 each, to both retail and wholesale clients while staying in school. Now one challenge Paul faced, just being young, is that some people didn't take him seriously. A friend of his pointed out when you're young, people assume you don't know anything, but then you just have to prove them wrong. Well, $40,000 in revenue two years in a row should be enough to prove anyone wrong, and presumably it will continue to grow.

At the same time, Paul's got other ideas he wants to pursue. The woodwork fashion item has clearly been a big success, but he also doesn't want to get too tied down. [Music]

Well, from time to time, we feature stories on marketplaces like Etsy, and the response sometimes is, Etsy is such a crowded marketplace. It's hard to succeed there, and yes it is, but one of the reasons why it's hard is there are so many people trying to sell the same thing, and so the reason Paul was able to be successful is because he started by making and selling general woodcrafted items, and it was going okay, it was fine, but once he started focusing on the wooden bow ties, which almost no one was selling, at least to a high level of quality, that's when he started making real money. So yes, it's a crowded marketplace, but there are a lot of buyers there.

That's why sellers migrate there, and so you have to ask yourself, what can I sell that other people are not selling, at least in a different way, or in Paul's case, the differentiator was quality. So don't be afraid of crowded marketplaces, just be afraid of doing the same thing everyone else is doing. I think that's the lesson there. I'll leave you with that today, as well as the encouragement that inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Let's take these ideas we hear about and use them as fuel or inspiration for our own ideas, our own projects.

What step can you take today to get closer to a goal you believe in? I hope you'll do that. I also hope you'll continue to listen, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.