This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, there's a lot of school listeners. Welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. For everybody who's listening in real time, hope your holiday week is going well. If you're listening later, I totally understand because the holidays can just take over your life, man.
So much stuff going on. I hope you are well wherever you are in the world, whatever time it is. Today, we've got a story about someone who makes an accidental invention that eventually becomes a side hustle making up to $20,000 per trade show. This invention is a cannabis accessory. Well, it actually becomes a series of accessories, but it all starts with one.
And this project was a long time in the making, basically about a professional cartoonist who becomes a woodworker and then stumbles upon this smoky side hustle success, eventually becomes a business with distribution in hundreds of stores across the US and Canada. And you know, sometimes I say that we're all on a journey. Well, sometimes you find your success by following life where it leads. And so it takes a while. But if you make active decisions, you're usually gonna be in a better place than when you started.
Like so many others, this story illustrates that fact. And I will bring it to you in just a moment after this quick little shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Bruce Jorgensen took the long way to arrive at his side hustle. After getting a degree in journalism, he spent the 1970s as a cartoonist, drawing for magazines, books, and advertisements. Most notably, his cartoons appeared in almost every issue of High Times Magazine from 1976 to 1983.
If you're not familiar with High Times, it was founded in 1974, actually continues to this day as the pre-minute magazine covering the cannabis industry. And of course, that industry has evolved and changed quite a bit over the past few decades, especially in the US. While he was doing that, Bruce also started his own political cartoon syndicate for which he drew four editorial cartoons a week that appeared in over 380 newspapers across the US and Canada. But as you'll hear, this actually led to something much different. After moving with his wife and three young children into a new neighborhood in New Jersey, he met one of his neighbors, John, and they became fast friends.
John was a quadriplegic who had limited mobility in his arms with no fine motor control. John smoked cannabis, which he found controlled his seizures and trembling. But he couldn't smoke without help from his nurse or a friend, which was inconvenient at best and sometimes humiliating. Bruce immediately saw that he could make John's life a bit easier and crafted him a holder out of a wooden chopstick and a metal alligator clip. John could hold the stick and regained both the ability to smoke on his own and also a bit of dignity.
Bruce thought nothing of it, but friends of both Bruce and John noticed what a cool smoking tool it was and they requested ones for themselves. So Bruce made some and gave them out for Christmas that year. By the way, if you're wondering why all of Bruce's friends smoked pot in the early '80s, well, remember he was an artist for High Times Magazine. But let's fast forward more than 10 years later. In the late 1990s, Bruce was still working as a cartoonist, but the work had grown stale for him.
A friend offered him a job as a woodworker and Bruce jumped at the opportunity. After a couple of years of learning, he happened to visit some old friends and noticed that they were still using the makeshift smoking tool that he had created for them long, long ago. All of his friends confirmed that it was their preferred tool. It wasn't until that moment that Bruce realized he had invented a potentially marketable product. With his new woodworking skills, he started working on more refined designs and trying different materials.
He distributed the new designs to his friends and they confirmed that this product was even better than the original. He made a few more experiments, but then the smoking one got put on the, let's say the back burner, as he focused on his career as a woodworker. He became a master at finishing wood products and also started keeping usable scrap pieces of wood. His boss was happy to get rid of those scraps and Bruce was accumulating a stockpile of expensive hardwoods. More time went by and he started collecting the tools he would need to continue tinkering with his smoking wand.
For around $600, he managed to scavenge or buy at well below cost everything he needed. A band saw, table saw, planer, joiner, router, and a drill press. In the late 2000s, he started making his smoking wands again, this time from the scrap hardwood pieces. He decided that the product would be all natural in color, finish, and wax. And at this point, he didn't have any branding on the wand at all.
In fact, he says he didn't even think about it. Once he had about 40 of them made from various woods, he and his wife Deb used some vacation days to visit their daughter in Montreal. While they were there, they decided to see if there were any shops interested in their product. And in fact, the first shop they went into, the staff was so impressed, they called the shop owner and ended up placing an order for 300 wands on the spot. They wanted all 40 that he had brought so they could take photos and get them online.
Bruce was encouraged that his idea had so much traction and he got back to his shop to fulfill the order. Not long after this first major sale, Bruce lost his woodworking job due to the recession. Fortunately for him, New Jersey offered a six-week program for the unemployment office that helps people come up with a business plan and learn basic skills like bookkeeping. With his support, he began to turn his side hustle into his third career, and he also came up with the name Mystic Timber. They had a website made and created the logo.
Bruce threw the tree and Deb did the lettering and design. They made sure to keep that logo simple so it could work well online and engraved on their products. And since Bruce was now working on this full-time, he started turning out the wands and stepping up his marketing. He reached out to shops across the country and little by little, Bruce got his products into more locations. When they were visiting Bruce's parents in Florida and also hitting up shops in person, one of the shop owners asked how to display the smoking wands.
Bruce realized that if he created an attractive wooden display, he could solve that problem for those shop owners. He says they're time-consuming to make, but they're now an integral part of his wholesale marketing. It was during that same trip to Florida that Bruce learned about industry trade shows, which sounded like a great way to meet more shop owners. Bruce and Deb designed their booth to reflect the natural wood that the products were made from and they even recruited their son's girlfriend to dress up as the mystic timber fairy to greet potential buyers. Trade shows aren't cheap.
Bruce estimates they spent over $2,000 on the booth costs, shipping, sample products, flights, and hotel rooms, but they got orders from over 50 new shops during the show and many more after. Next year, Bruce realized that his wood-handled smoking wand was just a small slice of the cannabis tool market. Vaping had become popular and Bruce was getting inquiries about accessories for that. He started making more products in his mystic timber line and he now wholesales these products to hundreds of stores across the U.S. and Canada.
This story might sound like a natural success, but Bruce says, "I feel like we learned everything the hard way. Most of the good information we got came from friends and colleagues in the business, from honest suppliers and from enthusiastic customers, but with every lesson we've evolved to accommodate the market which is ever-changing. Over time, he also learned to market the product first and then make it. Now everything he makes is already sold, whereas in the beginning he was making products and hoping to sell them." Current practice sounds a lot better. Even with minor missteps along the way, Bruce kept at it and his revenue steadily increased year after year.
He's continued to sell wholesale to smoke shops and more recently started selling direct to consumers as well through his website. Selling direct to consumers doesn't bring in as much money overall, but it has a much higher profit margin. He's also really figured out that trade show circuit and can now bring in more than $20,000 in sales at a three-day show. Through all of these efforts and through the many lessons he's learned over many years, Bruce has managed to take mystic timber from a smoky side hustle to a profitable, sustainable business. Those smoking ones weren't just a one-hit wonder.
It was high time for him to reflect on his success. [Music]
Well, this story did of course take place over a very long journey. And just to be clear, I don't want you to wait 20 years for your side hustle, but I do think the story kind of illustrates the value of paying attention to something that you might not think is a big deal, but matters a lot to other people because Bruce never intended to become an inventor or a full-time woodworker. Maybe some of the skills he had as an artist and cartooning were helpful in that regard, but this whole thing started more than 20 years ago as a favor to a friend. And again, he didn't think much of it at the time, but it was a huge deal for his friend.
And then other people liked it too. And then we go back many years later and see that they're still using that same tool and he thinks, okay, maybe there's something to this. But by then he's begun a new career or he's getting ready to begin a new career. And it's only later once he realizes that there is this market demand for it. Maybe this could be something that is not just a fun side hustle, that smoky success as I called it, but also something that allows him to build a brand and make money and create something that's sustainable and enduring.
I was thinking like what else fits into this category that's not something like cannabis if you're not into that because everybody's into different stuff. And something quite different in topic and focus that might show a similar lesson. Last week's episode number 346 about the ESL teacher who booked surprise trips for people who don't like trip planning. That's the kind of thing where she was always good at doing trip research. And she loved to put together itineraries and didn't understand at first that not everybody liked to do that.
And some people actually felt overwhelmed by that process. And so in turning it into a side hustle, she's able to, like I often say, help people while also help herself. There's also episode 312 about another artist, a Mexican artist who becomes a YouTube superstar with 50 million views. And this is a guy who actually was a somewhat well-known artist, but didn't get paid very well, didn't have a sustainable income until he started showing people how to draw using these videos. Just kind of understanding that, you know, because you know how to do something doesn't mean other people know how to do it, other people might want to learn.
We could probably apply this lesson to many, many different stories, but you know, I don't want to just blow smoke. It's probably high time for me to conclude this episode. So I will say inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/354. Come and check it out.
You can learn more about Mystic Timber. Thank you so much for listening today. I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
