This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Designer scales personalized wedding products to one million dollars. It's actually one M plus here on my notes. So I think that means more than a million dollars. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau in this week's Throwback Thursday segment.
We're gonna hear from a graphic designer who does custom illustrations for weddings and other events. It is in fact now a seven figure business. And as I said, this is Throwback Thursday, a Throwback Thursday segment where we get to take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Last week we heard about Mombox, which also I believe became a million dollar business, was acquired in fact. And today we're gonna hear from this graphic designer focusing on custom illustrations.
She's based in New York City. She taps into the wedding e-commerce market, was able to get out of debt and turn her side hustle into full-time work. Not every side hustle has to scale like this one or Mombox, but we do look at a variety of stories. And I think this is just a remarkable success. So let's hear more about this directly from Kristin.
I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
My name is Kristin Barry-Mosaurus. I live in New York City. My business side hustle is Miss Design Berry and I was on episode 178. Miss Design Berry is an e-commerce shop.
We specialize in custom illustration pieces for weddings and other big events. I graduated and moved to New York in 2011 and I was working in advertising. And even though I was making good money, I still needed extra money. And I had gone to school for design and illustration. So I just started an Etsy shop and started doing it on the side after work and slowly, slowly grew it.
And then in 2015 is when I ended up leaving my full-time job to run Miss Design Berry full-time. Since I was last on the show, I ended up working with a business coach for about 18 months. And he helped me actually really change our pricing model and the way we interact with our clients. One of my goals was to move all of our business off of Etsy. It took us about one year and we did end up doing that.
We sell to a smaller group of clientele now with a much higher average order value. So as of 2019, our revenue was still about 1 million. And so this year will probably grow about 20%. Beyond that, we are launching a second brand, a children's brand later this spring, which makes kind of sense. It's the logical next step because the next thing for our clients, they get married and they start their own family.
So we'll be doing lots of stuff for sort of a first child in new families. And then the last update is that I have started doing some consulting work as well for other small businesses who are looking to move from a primarily Etsy focused business to their own website as well. So I have launched my own website and we'll be launching an online course for that later this year. If you are a small creative business, Etsy is a really wonderful place to start. You're able to get sort of built-in traffic.
You can test out products and really see what the market wants and what's maybe not so popular. And you're able to get a lot of feedback from clients and really kind of figure out where your footing is and what you ultimately want to be selling. For us, we reached a certain point where there was a lot of competition who were basically just ripping this off. We were paying an insane amount in fees yearly for Etsy. And Etsy was changing a lot of their logistics and the way that they ran things.
So what had worked for us for several years in terms of advertising and that sort of stuff had really started to become a lot more expensive. And we were at a point where we kind of knew what our niche was. We knew who our target clientele was and we felt like we were ready to move off the platform to just have a bit more freedom. I think for anyone who's looking to sell our illustration design, some kind of something under that umbrella online, it really is helpful today to have a very specialized niche because the more specific you can be in what you're selling and who you're targeting, there's a lot out there. There's a lot of competition.
And if you're trying to blanket and sell to everyone, you're gonna sell to no one. And for us, we've realized we've gotten more and more specialized as the years go on. And that's only helped us grow, which sometimes it can seem like that doesn't make sense, but it really does. One really special component that we've kind of added into our business model is we have partnered with a dog charity called the Beagle Freedom Project and a portion of all of our sales now goes directly to them. It's something I'm really passionate about, dogs and rescue organizations.
And so that's been like a goal for me ever since I started my business. So I'm really happy now that we're able to really give back to them through our business and all the clients that we're able to serve us. [Music]
Awesome, thanks so much, Kristen. Really appreciate you sharing. And I will give a shout out to the Beagle Freedom Project as well.
Check it out at bfp.org. Sounds like a worthy cause. And listeners, let me know what you think. Hope you enjoyed this segment. We've got much more coming up.
If you have an update, a question, if you have a request, sidehustleschool.com. You can also download or stream every single archival episode there completely free. Everything is free. Today was 3,316, 3316. I hope you'll subscribe or follow for more.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
