058
7 min 51 sec

50 Shades of Grey Inspires Bedroom Items Hustle

A chemical engineer capitalizes on the 50 Shades of Grey craze by creating a collection of adventurous products, all hidden in a series of ordinary-looking books.
Manufacturing PG 13 Product Themed Ideas Unique Ideas

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What It's About

Chemical Engineer creates a themed-series of sexual health products with unique packaging.

Business Model
Product
Skills Required
Business Savvy & Manufacturing
Complexity
High
Profit Potential
Medium

Words of Wisdom

It’s important to be cautious about trend marketing. Whenever there’s a trend or a craze in the culture, you can definitely make some money from it—but you need to do so pretty quickly, because most trends by definition don’t last very long.

This might be an exception, though, because 50 Shades of Grey is more of a phenomenon. If it’s a trend, it’s a very long-term one, so it will probably be in the culture for a while. Anne has been pretty smart to capitalize on it in a way that’s not totally derivative. If you look at the website, there are some references to that series, but she hasn’t really built the branding on it.

Learn more about Anne and her "novel erotic kits" on her website, Novel Erotics!

Fun Fact

There was a lot of hard work that went into getting Novel Erotics where it is today, and Anne was a very diligent engineer in this process.

To start, Anne and her husband came up with concepts and themes for each novel, putting together collections of existing products so they didn’t have to manufacture all of the items themselves. To design the kit, they explored craft stores to get inspiration from book storage boxes.

After they fine-tuned their products, Anne used a website called Alibaba to identify suppliers, and drew from the background she’d acquired working in systems for her day job to screen out suppliers that didn’t generate the high-quality she wanted.

Resources

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Quote of the Day
"Do a candid self-assessment, and ask your friends to give you honest feedback on what your strengths and weaknesses are as it relates to your side hustle. Then, identify the resources that will fill the void, so you can focus more on what you do best.
"
—Anne Moyer #SideHustleSchool

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To infinity and beyond,

Chris Guillebeau