Underwear Side Hustle Turns Into $500,000/Month Business

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

[Music]

An underwear side hustle turns into half a million dollars a month? What? That's right, friends and listeners. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

Despite having no background in fashion, two women set out to make underwear for different sizes and body shapes. When their project hits, they decide to go all in. It now brings in more than $500,000 a month and employs 15 people. But hey, this isn't a startup story. It was, in fact, a side hustle.

It was just a crazy idea these two women had and they decided to pay attention to that crazy idea. All right, in this episode, we'll also take a look behind the scenes at every tech tool they use to run this business. So I got a long list for you at the end of this episode of all the different tools, platforms, services they use to make this happen. Don't go anywhere, let me say a quick little thank you to our sponsor and then on with the show. [Music]

Fran Dunaway is the CEO and co-founder of Tomboy X.

The company makes underwear, swimwear, and lounge wear that isn't for everybody but is for anybody. They're focused on fit and quality, offering every style and sizes extra small to 4X. They've gone from zero employees two years ago to 15 today. Before they started what was supposed to be a side project, Fran and her co-founder Naomi, who was also her wife, weren't experts in fashion. Both of them had other goals, but they also had a burning desire to make beautiful button-up shirts for women.

They wanted to create a shirt with fine quality fabric, fun details, and the perfect fit for a woman's body. They chose the name Tomboy X because they thought it was cute. To compensate for their lack of background in the fashion industry, Fran and Naomi did a lot of research. They wanted to see what made a lifestyle brand truly stick with a dedicated fan base as opposed to all the ones that came and went. They discovered something important, the lifestyle brands with similar features they discovered something important, the lifestyle brands with staying power started by focusing on one hero product and then building from there.

Pay attention to that phrase, hero product. This doesn't mean that a good lifestyle brand doesn't expand in ad products, but it does mean that they build a core business around that one hero product. An early Kickstarter project for Tomboy X shirts outraised its $75,000 goal, but they also learned something even more important through the process. The hero product for Tomboy X wasn't shirts, it was boxer briefs for women. They got more requests for that than anything else.

With this brief front of mind, they set out to make the softest, longest lasting waistband out there. They were determined to create one that you wouldn't even notice because it's so comfortable. In other words, it wouldn't cut off your circulation. They sent off for samples from suppliers and soon had a broad selection, except it was a broad selection of waistbands that didn't work. You could say those waistbands didn't fit that brief.

Thankfully, one was close, but not perfect. So they asked to work with the supplier to make some tweaks. Then with the waistband formula of their dreams, they focused on finding quality fabrics for the underwear and building a design that had seams in all the right places and legs that didn't ride up. In search of suppliers, they went to visit factories. That's right, they didn't just log on to Alibaba, they wanted partners who were in it for the long term and who shared their values.

They finally found one in Vancouver, British Columbia that had some experience making boxer briefs for men and was excited about trying something different. Or at least eventually, they started making more kinds of underwear, including a bikini cut and other variations. Growth has been extremely rapid. Every year, they've increased sales at least 100%, and two years ago, they did a major rebranding, which sent their online sales skyrocketing even higher. In the early days, Fran would manage the Facebook ads herself in real time.

Every day, she'd set a revenue goal and then turn it off when she hit it. By the way, for our listeners who have experimented with Facebook ads and not had that result, nice work if you can get it, basically. Remember that they focused first and foremost on the product here. Once they had the product right, that's when they figured out the advertising, not the other way around. Since then, they perfected the formula for spending on ads and bringing in new customers, especially through Facebook, but also through podcast ad buys and other mediums.

They have a team that does nothing but work on this. Instagram has been especially important for engagement and they communicate daily with more than 75,000 followers. If any of this sounds intimidating, remember this is now a company. It wasn't their goal to turn their side project into a multi-million dollar operation. They found their hero product, but they also made their customers their heroes.

Images on that Instagram profile and their website tell the stories of the target market they started with. Not everybody, but anybody. They've clearly struck the right tone with the right products and the right audience. [Music]

All right, an amazing success here. Sometimes a side hustle can really, really grow.

It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to turn into a huge company. It can just be something that brings extra money to you while allowing you to express your creativity or all the other reasons we talk about for having a side hustle. But again, sometimes a side hustle can really, really grow. So I love bringing these stories sometimes that highlight this big kind of success.

Now, in the beginning of this episode, I promised you a list of programs and platforms, services that they use for various things. I wanted to mention it because pretty much all of these services are really basic things. In fact, you probably use some of them yourself. So I'll just give you a little rundown now, but of course we're gonna link them up in the show notes page, which will make it a lot easier. In order, the platform they use is Shopify.

That's how they have their website. And they also sell directly on Amazon. For email marketing, they used to use MailChimp. That's where they started and that's where they stayed for several years. But they recently switched to another service called Clavio.

I don't know if I'm saying that correctly because I'm not that familiar with them, but I think it's Clavio. K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. In terms of analytics and statistics, they just use Google Analytics, which everyone has access to, at least for basic data. For shipping, they use ShipStation, our longtime partner, yay ShipStation. For teamwork and productivity, they use Google Suite, Dropbox, Slack, and Asana.

Asana is a project management system, essentially. For taking money, they use PayPal, Shopify payments, and Amazon payments, pretty simple. Social media, they're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. So all the major ones, but not like a thousand small ones. Their bookkeeping is done through QuickBooks and their customer service is done through Zendesk.

If you don't care about any of those details, don't worry about it. I just thought it'd be helpful for people who are trying to get into this kind of e-commerce. Again, all of those tools are really, really simple, which is why I wanted to mention them. So can you run a business that's doing half a million dollars a month on these simple tools? Yes, and a lot of people do.

To me, that's just another sign of why there's never been a better time to start something like this because these tools are so affordable. In many cases, free or very low cost. And the cost tends to scale as your business scales. So if you have hundreds of thousands of email subscribers on your newsletter list, for example, you're gonna be paying a lot for that. Probably a thousand dollars a month or perhaps even more.

But the point is you don't pay that until you get to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. You're gonna be paying a much smaller amount when you're just getting started. And presumably once you've got hundreds of thousands of subscribers, then hopefully you're making money, at least if it is an e-commerce website. As I said, we will link all those things up for you on the show notes page. Let's see what that page is today.

I believe that page is sidehustleschool.com/563. Of course, we'll link up Tomboy X as well, their social and their website. Go and check them out. Thank you so much for listening. And don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

I'll be back tomorrow with another motivating practical story. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]