Hometown Bracelets Support Local Marine Life

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

[Music]

Greetings, hello, welcome back. You are listening to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. I have the privilege of speaking to a global community every day all about taking more ownership of your life, creating a second income for yourself, a third income perhaps, essentially designing a future for yourself so that you have options, you have a backup plan, you can do what's important to you even if your choice is to remain in your current job, which a lot of our listeners choose to do. You don't have to be an entrepreneur.

There's lots of different ways to do this. Anyway, today's story is about someone who finds himself missing his hometown, or I guess his home region to be precise, when he relocates to the big city. This nostalgia eventually leads to a money-making project, shocker, that grew to provide a full-time income last year. I'll tell you how this New Englander went from idea to income. We'll also talk about a challenge he encountered as his project became more successful.

What if you're doing something that involves a design process or a production process and someone comes along and copies your designs? Well, if that person is down the street from you, that's one thing, but what if that person is overseas in a market that's basically inaccessible to you? In this case, instead of fighting it, today's featured case study decides to, well, stay tuned. I'll tell you how he got his idea, how he made it happen, and how he overcame that challenge in just a moment. [Music]

When Patrick Clark moved from Falmouth, Massachusetts to Boston to become a marketer for the financial industry, he didn't realize how much he would miss home.

The sand dunes, the expansive beaches of Cape Cod, the passion for marine life. He wanted to stay connected to it all. Patrick had tried a few sod hustles in the past, but had never really felt passionate about them. When it was time to put himself out there to sell whatever he'd made, he realized he didn't fully believe in it. One early January day, something changed when he sketched the coastline of Cape Cod in a notebook.

He looked at the L shape of the cape and had what first felt like a random idea. He could loop a band through an attached ring on one side of the cape, then hook the band around the L side to make a bracelet. It was a simple concept, but it felt right. Patrick went to Craigslist to find someone who could turn his sketch into a digital 3D model. A few revisions and a couple of weeks later, Patrick sent his complete CAD file to an online 3D printer.

This was right around the time 3D printing was becoming affordable, and since his design was made from just a single material, it was the least expensive option, especially compared to getting a prototype from an overseas manufacturer. A few rounds of revisions and reprints went by, but each one was quick. Since Patrick was using a local printer and a local designer, it took him less than three months to have his first bracelet ready to sell. But he didn't sell that first bracelet. In fact, he didn't sell any bracelets at all, at least at first.

Instead, he spent a couple of months playing a game of Finders Keepers with friends and Cape Cod locals on Instagram by placing what he now called Cape Clasps in geocaches around the area. This generated excitement and a sense of exclusivity for those early Finders. And it also just felt fun. At one point during those months of experiments, Patrick was walking down Main Street in his hometown, just doing his normal thing. A local shop owner walked up to him and asked where he got the bracelet he was wearing.

Patrick said, "Well, I made it." By the end of the day, he had a $700 check in his hands for a few dozen Cape Clasps. This spontaneous expression of interest from a shop owner pushed Patrick from geocaching to cash making, and he started taking his design to shops all around the Cape. By July 3rd, that year, Cape Clasps was being sold in a handful of boutique stores in the area. On July 4th, he launched his Shopify store, CapeClasps.com. He soon released other designs, a Great White, a Turtle, an Anchor.

The online sales grew to a few hundred dollars a month and then a thousand dollars a month. He also started donating 15% of profits to local marine life organizations. You could say he wasn't shellfish with his money. For example, proceeds from the Turtle Clasp would go to the Massachusetts Autobahn Society, and the proceeds from the Hammerhead Shark Clasp would go to a shark preservation organization. Customers love the direct connection from clasp to donation.

Now it's all going great, right? But here's where the story hits a road bump, just like your side hustle is gonna hit road bumps too. Here's what happened with Patrick's. Sales were growing, the Cape Clasp Instagram was blowing up, but the journey took a strange turn. A customer sent him an email one day saying that they saw eerily similar products being sold elsewhere.

When he investigated, Patrick discovered that his most popular item, the Great White Clasp, had been ripped off by an overseas seller. Not only that, this seller had good distribution because all of a sudden his unique design was popping up in stores all over the world. It was frustrating, but Patrick realized it meant he was doing something right. He didn't want to react to the ripped off product with self-pity, he wanted to beat it. He launched an improved website, came out with more designs and streamlined his 3D printing process to be smoother and more efficient than ever.

The copycat manufacturer eventually went away as Patrick continued to make his product better and better. 2017 was Cape Clasp's best year. The business brought in $60,000 in sales and donated over $10,000 to marine life organizations. As a result, Patrick moved back to Fama and he's now on the brink of a new product line that he says will take him out of his comfort zone. What is it?

Well, we fished for an answer as to what this new line might be. But Patrick said, we'll just have to wait and see for ourselves in a few months. All right, friends and listeners, community, when you encounter struggles of all kinds, there's an important question to ask. That question is, can I do anything about this? If the answer is yes, great, get out there and do it, right?

Don't hold back, make yourself take action. Ask yourself what your life could be like if you took that action. Do whatever it is you need to do to move forward. But if the answer is no, there's not much you can do about it, maybe you should just let it go. Or maybe you should use it as inspiration for something else.

Maybe you should focus on the future. Maybe you should focus on doing something better. Maybe you should just say, you know what? I'm not gonna worry about something that's outside my control or outside my influence. Even if it's annoying, even if it's frustrating.

So of course, that's what Patrick did when he saw that overseas manufacturer who had copied his design and was selling it elsewhere. He realized like he wasn't a big company. He didn't have the resources to track down that manufacturer in China. So he just decided to focus on the future and focus on doing something better. And even though it was annoying and frustrating by choosing to focus on the future on doing something better, his business continued to grow.

Interestingly enough, something I didn't mention is that at a certain point, Patrick tried creating a few designs that were a bit less Cape Cod-like. He thought, well, I've got the Cape Cod thing locked in, like what else can I do? But it turned out that those were his least successful products. So he realized that for Cape Clasp, it really was important to focus on local designs connected to local organizations. And so he did.

And now it's going well. Now he's got that other thing on the horizon he's working on and he didn't get overly sidetracked by that challenge, by that frustration. Well, friends, I hope you enjoyed this story. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/402.

Come and check out the Cape Clasps. You can also check them out on Instagram, where they have more than 30,000 followers, lots of awesome photos. Until we meet again, I hope you have a wonderful day, a wonderful week. I'll be back tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Sidustleschool.