TBT: These "Sweatpant Overalls" Produce Joy and Extra Pockets

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Have you heard of the Swoveralls, the Sweat Pant Overalls? This is a product we first featured long ago on the podcast. Actually put it in the 100 side hustles book, just because it was so lively and joyful and such a great mashup of two concepts. If you're trying to figure out what your next side hustle should be, perhaps it is a combination of two things. That's what Kyle Bergman discovered.

He is the creator of Swoveralls, combination Sweat Pant Overalls. These Sweat Pant Overalls produce joy and extra pockets. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. It's your host, Chris Guillebeau. In this segment, we take a look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.

We've had all kinds of features in this segment over the years. Today, we're gonna go to Kyle. He had this vision to create men's Sweat Pant Overalls. It's not a joke. You can go online and look for them, Swoveralls.

They're sold in lots of stores, and of course, directly on his website. Let's hear from Kyle. He's based in Brooklyn. We first had him long, long, long ago, more than 3,000 days ago, in fact, or close to that, which is a really, really long time. That was year two of the podcast.

So Swoveralls are still out there. I'll mention that at the end, but let's have some updates from Kyle. [Music]

My name is Kyle Bergman. I am based in Brooklyn, New York. The name of my side hustle is The Great Fantastic.

We make Swoveralls, and I was on episode 394. Swoveralls are the glorious combination of sweatpants and overalls into one incredibly comfy masterpiece. At the beginning, I was just solving a personal problem. Wasn't even looking at a business opportunity. I just wanted a pair of sweatpants overalls, and they didn't exist.

There were some tertiary competitors or offerings for women in the jeggings department. There was a BuzzFeed article in 2016 that showed a pair of jeggings. They looked like denim overalls. They're made from a sweatpants material. I saw those and I said, "Wow, I would love a pair of something kind of like that." And looked online, couldn't find anything, so I made Swoveralls.

Once I went online and discovered that there weren't any sweatpants overalls for men available, what I did find was a supplier in China through the Alibaba platform. At the time, I was a buyer at Birchbox, and prior to being a buyer at Birchbox, I had been at Bloomingdale's. And I knew, based on my retail experience, that if I went to this buyer and was serious about a larger order, they would send me a sample. And that's more or less exactly what happened. I received the sample, and it was at that moment when I got them that I thought, "There might be something bigger here than just getting myself a pair." Around the same time, I was starting business school at NYU, and one of my professors showed me a really cool tool that Google has called the Keyword Search Planner, where you can search the volume for any specific keyword over a given timeframe.

And it was at that point when I had just the one sample that I realized around 500 people a month were also looking for sweatpants overalls online. And so I actually went back to this supplier. Initially, I will be honest with you, I was bluffing. I had no intention at the beginning to buy any large quantity of sweatpants overalls, but then when I discovered that there was a demand for this, I went back and placed my first order and put them on Amazon through Amazon's fulfillment, their FBA platform. So initially, these were being sold just for men and just on Amazon, quickly expanded to women, and shortly thereafter, also launched swoveralls.com.

The last time I was on the show, we were doing about $67,000. We had just ended our first year and we were profitable. It was really exciting, small yet profitable. Since then, a ton has happened. I was on Shark Tank.

We surpassed the half a million dollar sales mark in total swoveralls sold. So a little over two and a half years old. And we are just about to launch a completely new product, Obie Shorts, which is going to be the not so distant cousin or relative to the current product we offer, swoveralls, which is the pants version. This advice, I think, can be applied specifically to wanting to get into the apparel game, but it also can be more general. And I think it has to do with being okay with everything not being completely perfect.

Shortly after being on the Side Hustle School podcast, the first time we launched a Kickstarter campaign and that was for swoveralls 2.0. And we had improved the product and we're really excited to offer not only an improved product, but more colors and size options for customers. We are now on swoveralls 9.0 or 9.1 or I've lost track. And if I had been waiting to make the perfect pair, I don't know if we would have even launched yet. And it's been two and a half years.

So I don't want to say that we're not always striving towards perfection or we want our customers to experience or not experience the best product every time. We're always looking to do that. But if things are good enough, we're constantly iterating. And a lot of times people, and it happens to me too, can get in their own heads about wanting to dot every I across every T before you take that leap. But especially for small businesses and people that truly believe in your story and what you're offering, they'll not only be forgiving, but they'll be supportive in helping improve the product.

I think I can attribute some of the success that we've had to kind of having that mindset and that approach. [Music]

Swoveralls.com, you can save 20% with code COSY20, COSY, C-O-Z-Y-2-0. Kyle, thanks so much for the updates. I'm so glad you're still making this epic clothing product. Constant iteration is indeed the way to win.

Kyle kept going back and making different versions of the product and he's still going strong as noted. Check it out for yourself. And listeners, let me know who you'd like to see featured or who you'd like to hear, I suppose, from our archives of more than 3,000 episodes and counting. So much more is coming up. I'm so grateful for you.

You can access all of those episodes for free at sidehustleschool.com. New episodes out every day, wherever you get your shows. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]