Game of Cones: Two Women Make Architecturally-Inspired Ice Cream

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

[Music]

Always bet on ice cream, or at least never bet against it. These are my opening words to you as we begin a new week here on Sidosville School. Welcome, so glad you're here. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I have the privilege of bringing you a new story every day of someone who's creating a different source of income.

This person is doing it by using a skill they already have and without spending a lot of money. In other words, our model is quite different from a lot of startup stories you may hear elsewhere. All right, so as we begin the week, what are some classic things that go together? I asked this on Twitter earlier when I was making some notes. Got some great responses, gin and tonic, macaroni and cheese, peaches and cream, milk and cookies, peanut butter and chocolate, and Netflix and chill.

And who's to say you can't have more than two things at once? I mean, what if I want milk and cookies with my Netflix and chill? In any case, today we're gonna add something to that list. The new couplet is architecture and ice cream. Wait, what?

Yes, architecture and ice cream, true story. In today's true story, which we're calling game of cones, two women make architecturally inspired ice cream after one of them is insulted by her UC Berkeley design professor. This ice cream goes on to debut at Coachella causing a minor sensation and years later is now a multi-million dollar business. So how did this all come to be? Well, I will tell you.

Ice cream, you scream, we all, actually you don't have to scream at all, not necessary. All we have to do is hear this quick thank you to our sponsor, really appreciate them allowing me to bring these stories to you every day for free and get ready to pick up your spoon. [Music]

Like many good things, Natasha Case's side hustle started by accident. While she was studying architecture at UC Berkeley, she was tasked with designing a student housing model. After she presented it to the class, her professor described the project as basically a box kick.

Like it was a bad thing. Since everybody likes cake, she decided to take her project even further and actually baked it for her class. This light bulb moment of combining food and architecture would return to her later. After college, she started a job as a Walt Disney Imagineer and began baking cookies and making ice cream for her coworkers. She enjoyed creating ice cream sandwich combinations that were a play on famous architectural concepts like minimalism, right?

Get it, like minimalism except better. And they were a hit. Natasha had always wanted to find a way to bring architectural design to a wider audience and seeing the sugar crazed ecstasy written on her colleagues faces as they consumed her creations, she realized that she might've found that perfect way of bringing her love of architecture to the masses. That pathway was design and dessert. But what started as a fun hobby might've stayed that way until her girlfriend, now wife, Freya, saw the business potential and what Natasha was doing.

Freya started asking about numbers and figures. The couple went on a research mission to Whole Foods where they wrote down how much ice cream products cost and started to work out the feasibility behind creating their own. While standing in those aisles, they noticed that ice cream products hadn't changed for a long time. They didn't see any brands with character and there was nothing that spoke to them as women or as millennials. Freya says that this only helped motivate them to design and introduce a product that represented the frozen zeitgeist of the times.

Two weeks later, they co-founded Cool House with the goal of restoring the diminished glory of ice cream sandwiches. Natasha and Freya both had full-time jobs, so they spent the weekends at local farmer's markets selling their treats and building their customer base. This allowed them to test their products and scale slowly without making a large financial investment into their business. They loved that weekly spot at the farmer's market, but when the opportunity came to sell their ice cream sandwiches at Coachella presented itself, they jumped. A few Craigslist searches and $2,500 later, they found an old postal van, one without a working engine, and had it towed out to the California desert.

This was a sink or swim event for them, or a make money or melt event, I guess, which involved people lining up at 7 a.m. and them accruing roughly 5,000 Twitter followers by the end of the day. It gave them the feeling that they were onto something, especially as the posts and mentions began to flood their feed, including a write-up in the New York Times that went viral. It's now been nearly a decade since that write-up, and Natasha and Freya have since built Cool House into a multi-million-dollar ice cream empire without investing much startup capital. So what have they learned along the way?

Two key lessons. First, they focused on the free aspects of what it would take to build a company. They knew that financing a business and raising money would be hard, not to mention undesirable, so they concentrated on finding resources and getting advice from blogs, events, and people who cared about them. Natasha suggests joining a co-working space so you can be around other people who are founding and building a business often while they're doing other stuff. Second, they paid attention to the importance of branding.

They put a lot of work into design and storytelling, and Natasha says that branding is one of the major factors behind Cool House going from barely profitable to, oh my God, we have real money coming in. Their current lineup of products includes pre-packed pints emblazoned with names like Sunday Funday and Midnight Munchies. All this came to be from a $3,000 investment. That investment included all initial ingredients and the Craigslist van. Still, big success takes time.

It wasn't a huge success financially until a few years in. In 2009, Natasha and Freya made about $100,000. The next year, they made $650,000. 2011 saw the opening of a brick and mortar store and breaking $1 million in sales for the first time. Since inception, Cool House went from school project to farmer's markets to Coachella, and later to partnerships with Whole Foods, full circle there, and a projected $12 million in revenue in 2018.

Natasha and Freya are currently working on new flavors and even more expansion through stores and retail partnerships to bring Cool House into your home. It seems like this side hustle was just meant to be, and Cool House is living the cream. [Music]

All right, congrats to Cool House, Natasha, and Freya. Amazing work. I had actually not heard of this brand before, despite the fact that they have been hugely successful, but I will definitely be on the lookout for them at Whole Foods or the next time I go to Coachella, which is never, but presumably I will see it somewhere.

Now, some quick analysis. The biggest change happened for them when they switched away from selling at local markets. It's interesting because I often tell stories of people who are selling stuff at farmer's markets, and that's how they started. They actually really enjoyed it, but they realized that that was very limiting for them. They could only get so far before getting stuck, and there was no scalability to it.

Now, not every side hustle has to scale, of course, but in their case, they wanted to grow the business. So what they did was they made a change. They stopped focusing so much on these in-person sales, and they started thinking a lot more about online sales. They started building relationships with retailers and distributors. They put a lot more work and attention into their website where people could purchase.

They could wake up in the morning and see that orders had come in while they were sleeping, and also through that process, they were able to sell in larger quantities, which of course means they can reach more people and therefore also increase profits. So nothing wrong with staying small, but if you do want to go big, if you do want to kind of expand a bit, go beyond just a side hustle or just a small side hustle, you definitely want to look at how you can get your product out to more people, and in this day and age, what better way to do so than online? Even for something like ice cream, which is of course a perishable product and seems like it would be difficult to ship, but apparently they've got that figured out as well. So again, great job, and listeners, I hope you enjoyed this one. I really enjoyed making it for you.

Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you, why did the ice cream truck break down? Because it went on a rocky road. You see, I always saved the best for last. Just rewards listeners who go through the whole episode. As always, my friends, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/688. That page will include links to everything I mentioned, including of course Cool House. You can go and see where they are stocked, so you can go and try them yourself if you have not done so already. I know I'm gonna be on the lookout, and if you have not yet picked up your copy of the side hustle book from idea to income in 27 days, I would encourage you to do so. It's been out for about a year now, every single day, I'm getting emails from listeners and readers who are applying the lessons, applying the step-by-step plan to build out their own project, whatever it is, whatever kind of product or service that they want to create, even while they're working a regular job.

And of course, as I said at the top of the episode, without spending a lot of money. All right, that's it, I'm out for the day, but I will be back again tomorrow. Gotta sign off so I can go have some ice cream. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]