This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Embroidered joke hat becomes unexpected business. Hey friends, hey listeners, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. It's your host, Chris Guillebeau. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday.
Every Thursday, we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Last week, it was all about a graphic designer who turned her digital sticker packs for note-taking apps into a $500,000, a half a million dollar e-commerce empire. So she did pretty well. We looked at her multi-platform expansion, new physical products, et cetera. Today, in our latest feature, we'll hear how a sarcastic embroidery project turned into a booming side hustle.
Also doing really well, not $500,000, but doing pretty well. Several thousand dollars a month at least. After a single joke hat sparked thousands of sales. That's right. We've in fact made a hat as a joke, a trucker hat, I believe, but we're gonna hear the story from them.
Embroidered joke hat becomes unexpected business. A single joke goes wild, sparks thousands of sales, turns into, well, as noted, a side hustle. Stay tuned. That detailed story is coming right up. [Music]
I made the first hat for fun.
No store, no plan. Just a beat up trucker cap I found at Goodwill. And the phrase, emotionally unavailable, but still takes it personally. I stitched it by hand using leftover thread and a plastic hoop from a craft kit. It was crooked, but I wore it anyway.
Then a friend borrowed it for a party, posted a selfie on Instagram, and that's when things really blew up. Within 24 hours, I had 10 people asking if they could buy one. Within a week, I had 30. So I set up an Etsy shop. The cost was zero to start and uploaded five designs.
I priced Seachat at $29 based on the materials and time it took to make one. About 30 to 40 minutes by hand. Aiming for a margin of 15 a piece after fees and supplies. I called the shop Stitch Please and wrote product descriptions like little tiny monologues. Weird, self-aware, slightly chaotic.
After about 40 orders, I reinvested the profits, around 800 at that point, into a used brother PE 800 embroidery machine. That cut my production time down to 10 to 15 minutes per hat. I also learned to digitize texts in sew art and use Canva for mockups when I didn't have a real product photo. I bought blank hats in bulk from cap wholesalers, usually 12 pack of foam trucker caps for 30 or $40. I stored them in a big Ikea bin under my desk.
I packaged each one myself using craft mailers and a branded thank you card I printed at home. Shipping was through Etsy's label system and I charged a flat rate of $4.95, which mostly covered USPS first class. Then came the real boost. Someone with 40,000 TikTok followers posted an unboxing of their order. Recovering people pleaser.
And overnight, I had a big bunch of orders in my queue. I stayed up till 2 a.m. Two nights in a row trying to catch up. That was the moment I realized, okay, this is a real business. Over the next six months, I added tote bags and sweatshirts.
I kept the voice consistent, snarky, but sincere, and offered a custom hat listing for $35, where customers could submit their own phrases. About 20% of orders came through that. Holiday season peak came wild. I brought in $8,700 in December. Mostly from people gifting the does not play well with capitalism hat or the still processing hoodie.
On average, the shop brings $3,000 to $4,000 a month now, with about 60% profit margins after material cost and shipping and Etsy fees. I still do everything myself, except now I've streamlined it down to batching 10 to 15 items at once, which I knock out in an afternoon. Most of my traffic is still organic. No ads, just weird hats, loyal customers, and a handful of people who keep tagging their therapist. [Music]
Emotionally unavailable, but still takes it personally.
I respect that. I need to get a hat that says that. And now I know where to get one. All right, listeners, let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of thousands of episodes. We're almost at 3,100, 3,099, in fact, is today's episode.
If you have a question and update about your hustle, www.sidehustleschool.com, some resources there on the site, an email list, detailed show notes for all 3,099 episodes, or at least most of them, pretty good majority of them. And of course you can follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It's always completely free. Thanks for being out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
