This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Aerospace Engineer soars to seven figure heights. Welcome friends, welcome to Side Hustle School. That's the title of today's episode. I actually thought of my childhood and adolescence when working on this story, not because the protagonist gets in trouble and becomes a juvenile delinquent, that's another story, but because there's a connection between Aerospace and selling on eBay. Both of my parents were Aerospace engineers, they're now retired, but I followed the path of selling on eBay, which of course, led to lots of other things later.
My career as an author, visiting every country in the world and so on. And in this case, in this story today, an eBay experimenter expands his make your own fashion products into a multi-brand e-commerce empire. He actually goes on to earn millions of dollars from selling T-shirts. So if you think selling on eBay or Facebook Marketplace or wherever is just a fun little hobby, it certainly can be, and that's okay, but it can also become a pretty significant business. So we could consider it a lesson in scale and paying attention, perhaps.
So I'm gonna give you a couple of practical tips at the end of the episode on how you could identify a market in which this model could work for you. 20 years on, in fact, 25 years on now, online auctions can still provide a lot of opportunity for people, especially when they're getting started. So without further ado, we're gonna hear about this aerospace apprentice. As I said, he does really, really well in making seven figures in the world of T-shirt design. Make your own fashion.
I'll tell you all about it in today's story. Stay tuned. [Music]
Many people dream of working in the aerospace industry. If you aren't in the clouds, traveling to your next destination, the next best thing might just be designing the machines that get us there. But for Ed Snelson, who landed an apprenticeship at Airbus UK with a year left at university, flying dreams were not enough.
Ed had also participated in a UK program called the Young Enterprise Scheme, which aims to teach young people the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and career advancement through real life practice. After learning what could be possible, Ed knew that he would work for himself one day. That day arrived pretty soon. From his childhood bedroom at his parents' house, after he spent eight or more hours during the day at his apprenticeship, he would come home and spend another couple of hours at night learning everything he could about selling online. And he soon decided that the easiest and cheapest way to enter the e-commerce space would be to start selling products on eBay.
He had noticed that many sellers were listing items they found around the house at flea markets or shopping at vintage thrift stores. Nothing wrong with that, but since Ed was already working a demanding full-time job, he didn't have the time to source items from lots of places. So instead, he focused on a market that was mostly for hobbyists and small businesses. Specifically, he began selling printed t-shirts, which he designed with a unique twist. The shirts included funny one-liners and engaging sayings that could be personalized for the buyer by adding their name or a distinguishing feature.
This made his inventory immediately more interesting than the bulk purchased graphic tees. At first, he sold them individually off his personal eBay account. And he even surprised himself when he made sales on day one. Within a couple of months, making a lot of sales, he knew he was onto something. And so as the demand was growing, so did his confidence to invest a few hundred dollars into branding an official eBay store.
Not a huge investment, of course, and it helped give him a more professional look. And a sea of other sellers doing something similar, this boosted his sales even further and allowed him to reinvest more. Now, he also knew he was missing out on a large part of the potential profit by paying screen printers so much, since each personalized item had to then be custom produced. So he used his earnings to purchase printing machines and shipping equipment, taking over production entirely. Again, he's doing this part time.
It was a lot of work and a big upfront expense, but it saved him constant recurring expenses in the future. From there, things took off quickly. Before long, he was working six or more hours a night, again, after finishing his full-time job. And of course, this was ultimately unsustainable. So within a year, Ed was making as much money from the side hustle as he was making in the job.
He knew it was time to quit so he could focus on one thing. Plus, he was finally able to move his base of operations from his childhood bedroom to his very first office. It felt like a real business. Once he was able to put all his attention on the eBay store, monthly revenue increased from a few thousand dollars a month up to $10,000 a month. He was able to offer more designs, produce larger orders with a quicker turnaround and reply to queries more quickly.
It was all the same work he'd been doing before. He just had more time to do more of it. The new revenue gave him the extra funds he needed to expand to different platforms, starting with Etsy and then Amazon's handmade products. And this led to a problem and an opportunity because while selling through other platforms was great for low cost marketing and traffic, it did not give him a great opportunity for repeat customers. People identified with a larger site like Etsy or eBay or Amazon, that's where they went to shop.
They weren't loyal to him. They didn't even care about his smaller storefront. As you know by now, Ed was smart. So he solved this problem by creating websites for his storefronts with different brand names. He didn't just choose one name.
He created a brand called Make Your Own Garments. He also made one called NYOG Prints. So he's trying a few different things. And since he needed traffic fast, he included note cards with all his purchases from the larger platforms. This is a tried and true trick, by the way.
If you're selling on Amazon or eBay or Etsy, pay attention. So he includes note cards with all his purchases, directing satisfied customers to his sites and offering a discount for their repeat business. The reason why that's so smart is that person's already purchased something from him. So presumably they're happy and now they have a chance to buy something from him directly and save money for themselves. So good trick.
With all of these different storefronts and a team of workers now running production and shipping, he registered a new business, Signature Printing Limited. Unfortunately, this brought a whole new set of headaches he was not expecting, including a large tax bill that he hadn't planned for since his business scaled so quickly. He also found that the systems he had for storing and marking products worked well when he was overseeing everything, but starting to work with larger platforms and getting help meant he had to go through his entire inventory to unify barcodes, item specifics, and so on. It was a ton of work, but of course he was up for it. That's what he does.
He works hard. Couple of years into doing all of this, he wins an eBay Business of the Year award, four years in, he's cleared 1.4 million pounds with a forecast to sell 2.1 million pounds the next year. That's something like $2.5 million. And as he has continued to grow in sales, the business basics have remained the same, providing high quality personalized apparel and gifts to customers who want something a bit more special than generalized bulk items. Having perfected this process, he also likes to help other brands who are starting out because he's got all the time in the world, apparently.
He does this by offering advice and even warehouse services at a lower rate than big companies do. It's important for him to give back to the industry that helped him realize his own dream of working for himself. The former aerospace apprentice has come a long way from selling T-shirts in his childhood bedroom. I think of this story as one of these iteration stories of like he's doing something that's pretty basic. Anybody can do this.
Anybody can start by reselling printed T-shirts or selling them in the first place or going to thrift shops as other people have done if you're able to do that. But then he just gets better and better at it. And he figures out, oh, I need to make a better storefront. Oh, I can go to other platforms. Oh, I can provide something that other people aren't doing in the same way.
So that's essentially how he grows from what, a couple of thousand dollars a month, up to this million dollar business. And I mentioned that the trick, it's not really a trick, it's just a best practice of if you're shipping stuff out that people have purchased from a platform like eBay or Amazon or wherever, and you're a third party seller, then you want to include a note card or some kind of promotional item to encourage people to buy from you directly. Another thing that's helpful when you are starting out, look at eBay and other sites, it doesn't have to be eBay, it could be anywhere, and look at the closed listings. You're usually able to search for those. Look at items that have sold and pay attention to not just what is for sale, 'cause there could be thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of items for sale, you wanna see what is actually selling if you're trying to figure out what is my market.
So of course you want to find items that are selling consistently and at a price that can justify whatever it costs you to acquire and then ship them. If you spend even a little bit of time on that, you're gonna be much better off than if you just kind of go into the process guessing and just trying to experiment, which is also fine, but you might as well experiment with a bit of knowledge, which will help you. All right, listeners, inspiration is good, that inspiration with action is so much better. I hope you found this story inspiring, especially how somebody who's really young in the UK is able to start this business with almost no capital and grow it to a very significant amount. Remember, there's something you can do too, and I hope you will do it.
I hope you'll get closer to it today. Take one step, just one action. We're cheering you on here at Side Hustle School. It's my privilege to make the podcast for you every single day. Complete archives of the 3,400 plus episodes are available at the website, you know it, sidehustleschool.com.
And of course, much more is coming up every day. Thank you so much, my friends. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
