This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Oh, hey there, what's up? Welcome back to a brand new week. My name is Chris Guillebeau, the host of "Sydusle School." Got an interesting story for you today. It's about a dude who is a fashion buyer for Bloomingdale's. So naturally he's well versed in the world of clothing trends.
And apparently a recent fashion craze, which you may know this, but I didn't, is for women to wear a combination of sweatpants and overalls. Again, maybe this is news to no one but me, but just in case I'm not the only one, apparently the combination of sweatpants and overalls is a thing. And so this guy who works at Bloomingdale's says, well, that's cool, but only for women? Why can't guys wear sweatpants and overalls, right? So personally, I don't wear sweatpants or overalls, but you know, to each his own, everybody's got a thing.
So this guy goes out to create his own brand and naturally he calls it Swoveralls. You guys, I can't make these things up. It reminds me of episode 360. We talked about this right after Christmas last year. It's about somebody who makes men's rompers.
Because once again, why should women have all the rompers? Or so the thinking went and it turned into a profitable side hustle. Very profitable actually. This one is profitable too, of course. He ends up making $24,000 from his Swoverall investment.
Friends, I'm just gonna call it like I see it. And of course, I'll tell you a bit more about the process and how he did it. He also had a creative idea to make his own mailing list because when he got started, he hadn't ever done anything like this before and he had to find a way to get the word out. So his solution was to write to the people he knew, but he kind of took it to the next level. So I'll explain as I bring you this story right after this quick thank you to our sponsor.
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Kyle Bergman never anticipated that reading Buzzfeed in his downtime would have an impact on his life beyond mere entertainment. But thanks to the recommendation of a friend, it gave him the idea for a profitable side hustle. See, Kyle was known around the Bloomingdale's fashion buying offices as a little bit quirky. He was the guy who would turn up on casual Fridays in a Hawaiian shirt when everybody else wore button downs and jeans. Because of this quirkiness, one of his friends sent him a Buzzfeed article she thought he would appreciate.
It was all about a new fashion craze of sweatpants and overalls. And Kyle did appreciate it. In fact, he liked the concept so much he really wanted a pair for himself. But he was disappointed in the entire article focused only on women. Naturally, when he got home from work that day, he spent the whole evening scouring the internet trying to find a pair of these overalls for men.
To his surprise shock and dismay, there were none. As a last ditch effort, he decided to look on Alibaba, a directory of overseas manufacturers, where he found a single factory drawing of male sweatpants overalls. But because factories are targeted to retailers, Kyle would have to order at least 300 units of these sweatpants overalls. It seemed he was out of luck. He would have to endure that long hardship of men who have to purchase their sweatpants and overalls separately.
Over the next eight months, Kyle thought about these overalls from time to time, but he never did anything about them. It was only when he started grad school at NYU that he decided to take action. He logged back into his Alibaba account and sent a message to Mandy, the Chinese supplier who first told him he'd need to order 300 units. He asked Mandy how much a sample would cost. She quoted him $150 for one pair and Kyle felt defeated again.
It would be another six months before he finally responded to that quote and bought a sample. This time he managed to negotiate her down to a lower price of $111. He put in his order and a few weeks later, he received a prototype that blew his mind. Sweatpants and overalls for men were awesome, or so he thought. The quality was good and it looked like a premium product.
By now, he had the idea and the resolve to turn this into a money-making project. He asked his new friend Mandy to make some changes so that the product would look more manly. She equipped his sample with thicker straps, a more masculine bib and a jogging pants cuff. She made these alterations for free and six weeks later, he received a finished product he was proud of. By now, he also had an equally hipster-esque name for his hustle.
He called them Swoveralls, as one does. He began looking at different ways to sell his product and he settled on the Fulfilled by Amazon program. With this option, he could send his Swoveralls to one of Amazon's warehouses and they would store it and deal with orders, shipping, customer service problems and returns. For their part, Amazon would take 15% and a $5 fee on each sale. This seemed like the most viable option for Kyle since it also allowed him access to Amazon's massive customer base.
Kyle ordered his 300 pair of Swoveralls from Mandy paying about $16 a unit. He then set the retail price for them at $85. In addition to the manufacturing cost, he also had to get them from China to the US and cover those Amazon commissions. He felt that $85 price was competitive but it also still allowed him to make a 50% profit margin. The major portion of Kyle's first sales came from his mailing list.
However, it wasn't a mailing list in the traditional sense. When he started, he didn't have a list of customers to market to. Instead, he manually compiled a list of over 700 people he knew, friends, colleagues, people he'd gone to school with, LinkedIn connections, pretty much anyone he could think of who he felt might be possibly interested in his new product or at least might appreciate it enough to pass it along. He reached out to all 700 people the day he launched the product and he had enough of an initial response to make several thousand dollars. The bigger break came when one of his friends got his Swoveralls featured in an article in Thrillist.
Thrillist is another online publication, kind of like BuzzFeed. That article went viral and began getting picked up by local news media and blogs all over the world. Fortunately, by this point, Kyle had set up a website using Shopify so that he could make sales of his own and build a real mailing list. This project is now one year old and through the combination of following a trend and reaching out to his old contacts has allowed Kyle to make over $65,000 in revenue or $24,000 of net income. He doesn't think the Sweatpants Overalls trend is going anywhere right away.
He's using that first year experience for this year's goal to make Swoveralls customizable to buyers by allowing people to add their own images or patterns to parts of the fabric. The first option will feature the pizza emoji because he says they're the perfect clothes to wear to eat pizza. [Music]
Well, as I say, from time to time, you never know what you're gonna hear on the show. I myself am surprised with all the stuff that's coming in through our submissions form. That reminds me, if you have a story, if you're doing something crazy like this that makes money, or you know somebody who is, we have a survey intake form on our website, sidehustleschool.com/about.
If you scroll to the bottom of that page, you'll see a link that says submit your side hustle story. Once again, that's sidehustleschool.com/about. And at that link, you can give us some information. If we think it's a good fit, we'll reach out to you or that person. And in this story in particular, I'm not sure what I think about sweatpants and overalls myself.
I don't think that's gonna become my go-to outfit, just like personally, I'm not into men's rompers. But hey, like I said, to each his own, I do think it is the most perfectly ironic hipster name, Swoveralls. So congrats to Kyle, good work. And I also really like what he did with his unconventional mailing list. He didn't have a list of customers or prospects, so he thought about every person he knew in the world.
Well, maybe not every person, but 700 people is a lot. And it was through reaching out to those people that he made a few thousand dollars in sales the first day. But more importantly, he found the connection to get him featured in this article that then got picked up by lots of outlets and brought him a lot of sales. $65,000 of sales in year one for $24,000 in profit. Not bad, right?
All things considered, it is a Swoverall success. I hope you enjoyed this one. Always remember inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you wanna check out the show notes and see what these things look like, just come to sidehustleschool.com/394. That's for episode 394.
I'll be back tomorrow with episode 395. Crazy how that works. I hope you're having a great day wherever you are. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
