Carpenter Pays His Mortgage Selling Embroidered Travel Patches

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

[Music]

Hey there, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau your host. For those listening in real time, we are kicking off a new month. Well, I guess yesterday we did that, but today's the second.

It still feels like a new month to me. And just like you heard yesterday, today's Side Hustle story is someone who started their project last year. Almost exactly a year ago, to be precise, February 2017. This guy from Montreal is selling a physical product. It's vintage inspired travel patches.

If you've ever backpacked or traveled internationally, you may have seen flag patches or other patches on people's backpacks. Well, this guy is actually a carpenter and gets the idea, initially through travel, to do something different and create a little business around it. And in less than a year, he starts earning more than $1,000 a month and his Side Hustle income goes to pay his mortgage. How about that for a tangible benefit of a second source of income? I'll tell you a bit more about how this came to be and just as importantly, how he sells these patches in today's feature.

And we'll kick that off after thanking our sponsor. [Music]

Today's story comes from Mike Leckie in Montreal, Quebec. By day, he's a carpenter. His Side Hustle is Vagabond Heart, a business making vintage inspired travel patches for people to sew on their luggage. When Mike was younger, he'd worked as a graphic designer and book editor.

Now as a carpenter, he missed some of the aspects of a desk job where he could sit down in clean clothes and work on a computer. He didn't wanna leave his job, but he wanted the best of both worlds. He started Vagabond Heart so he could get his hands dirty during the day and then work on the computer in the evenings. Basically the opposite of somebody who has a desk job and then does woodworking as a hobby or their Side Hustle. Mike likes to travel and he packs light.

That means in addition to not taking a lot of stuff, he also doesn't bring a lot home with him. He does, however, like to collect one set of items that don't take up much space. Those items are patches for his backpack. If you've backpacked before or if you've traveled pretty much anywhere, you may have seen patches like these on people's backpacks. Well, Mike had some of those, but he was also disappointed with how a lot of them looked.

They were just boring flags or other designs that looked like they came from a cheap souvenir shop. He wanted something that had a bit more style, patches that had a hip modern look, but with an unmistakable nod to the 1920s, 1930s era of luxury travel. Not only was Mike unable to find anything like that while traveling, he couldn't even find it online when he got home. So naturally he decided to make some himself. Mike already had a designer in mind, someone he'd found on Tumblr years ago when working on another project.

Next he had to find a manufacturer. Doing a search on the online business directory Alibaba, he found about 20 embroidery shops and requested quotes from them all. His main criteria, other than price, was a manufacturer willing to offer a small order size. He wanted to start with initial orders of just 50 pieces of each design. Mike's startup costs were low, $1,000 to have the patches designed, and then $500 to have them manufactured.

He decided in advance that in the worst case scenario, he could afford to lose that amount of money. He set a firm boundary to only spend that much, and he found that this strategy reduced the stress and fear. Once he had his patches ready, he decided to sell them on both Shopify and Etsy. Etsy sells handmade items, and Mike found that he got a lot of traffic through organic searches. But still, even though his store was online, when he got the first ding on his phone from Etsy announcing a sale, he was surprised.

The patches sell for $7, about the price of a pint of beer, so when he made that first sale, he went out after work and promptly spent his profit. Mike only made $75 his first month and $150 his second month, but then he started marketing the patches using Etsy promoted listings, which is easy to turn on or off with the click of a button. This feature lets you pay to have a listing show up as an ad, and you can set a specific price per click or let Etsy pick the price, and you can monitor the progress of listings on their marketing page. Using this strategy while only bidding small amounts, by the fourth or fifth month, Mike was making $1,000 a month in sales from Etsy alone. A couple months later, it was more than $1,000 a month in profit, and the money from his side assault goes to pay his mortgage.

In addition to patches, Mike started selling pin versions of his designs because people were asking for them. He also wondered about getting his patches and pins in stores, so he contacted a wholesaler who sold similar products. They purchased inventory from Mike on consignment, hold on to it, and then when one of the stores in their network makes a purchase, they handle the shipping. You could now find these patches at a number of shops, including the Booksmith in San Francisco, as well as shops in Hawaii, Florida, and Victoria, Canada. He says Etsy is still his best channel, bringing in more than 70% of sales, but his Shopify sales and those retail sales are growing.

With such a big world to cover, Mike's goal is to keep expanding the Vagabond Heart Collection from the 24 designs he has now to at least 50 this year, and hopefully see them stocked in more than 100 locations. And of course, he's planning more trips to find or create more patches. So within this story, you can find a very helpful strategy for reducing your risk. One of the main reasons why people don't start a side hustle is because they perceive it's risky. They think, "Oh, I have to make this huge investment." Or if I fail, then my role is gonna come crumbling down.

I'm gonna go bankrupt, I'm gonna lose my house. And maybe not everyone thinks to that extreme, but the point is the fear of risk or the uncertainty of risk is a big reason why more people don't do things like this. So I liked Mike's strategy of saying, "Okay, here are the minimum startup costs "that I need to do this." It's not gonna be free. It's not gonna be a $100 startup. I do need to spend about $1,000 on design and then $500 on manufacturing.

But still, to Mike's mind, he was thinking, "Okay, that's a reasonable amount." In the absolute worst case scenario, if I lose that money, well, I might be disappointed, but it's not the end of the world. So if I just decide, "Okay, that's my boundary," I'm not gonna spend any more than that until I know that the project is working, or at least that it's working a little bit. Then by doing that, he can feel secure, confident, safe, and direct his energy in a much more productive way, which is actually focusing on the project itself and getting those designs done and finding the right manufacturer and then setting up his Etsy store as well as his Shopify store, eventually contacting the wholesaler and the retail outlets. But all of it came from that decision to take action. Through travel, he had identified something that he thought could be done better, the travel patches.

He had a vision for it in terms of the aesthetic he wanted, something that was modern yet had this kind of throwback look to the vintage travel era of the 1920s and 1930s. And from there, it was just a matter of saying, "Okay, where is the best place to sell these? Like, how can I find people who might be interested in this kind of design and this kind of style?" So a lot of things to consider there. But again, my favorite is setting that boundary, saying, "Okay, here's what I have to spend, but I'm not gonna spend anymore. And if it really doesn't work at all, if I lose 100% of my money, then it's not the end of the world.

I'm not gonna go bankrupt. I'm just gonna learn something and I could try something else." And of course, in addition to asking yourself, "Okay, what's the worst thing that can happen?" I also think when you're doing this kind of analysis for yourself, you should also ask, "Okay, what's the best that could happen? Maybe I'll actually make enough money from this project to pay off my mortgage each month. Wouldn't that be awesome?" Well, having a side hustle is awesome. There are so many different creative expressions of it.

You can go in all kinds of directions. You can find what works for you. And of course, you don't have to take a lot of risk. So let's just remove that obstacle from your consideration. If you're not ready to do something now, that's totally fine.

But don't say it's because you don't wanna take a big risk because you don't have to. That's my encouragement for you today as you are thinking about or planning or actively working on your side hustle. Actively working is the best, of course, because inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you wanna check out today's show notes and see some photos of these patches, also see where Mike sells them and how he sells them, just come to sidehustleschool.com/398. That is for episode 398.

We are almost at episode 400. How about that? If you have a comment or question for me or for anybody that we feature on the show, just give us a call in the Hustle hotline. That number is 8449 Hustle or 8449487853. Thanks for being out there.

I'll be back with you tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.