Chemical Engineer Zips Up Solution for Baggy Shirts

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

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Have you ever had a shirt or a jacket or dress or other clothing item that you really liked except for one small detail? It doesn't fit, or at least it doesn't fit in one particular area. It looks great otherwise, it feels great otherwise, but at least in that one significant area, it's too baggy. Well, if so, you're not the only one. In today's story, an engineer receives a ridiculously baggy work shirt.

And he likes this shirt, but he's got that problem. It's too baggy. So he grabs it by the collar and designs a Zippy DIY tailoring device. Four years later, he's sold $150,000 of them. Yet he also makes a major mistake in failing to consider the Kickstarter effect, where he goes from receiving lots of attention, getting lots of backers, having lots of sales to a substantial drop-off in all metrics after the campaign has ended.

Welcome to "Side Hustle School." My name is Chris Guillebeau. How did this guy create this Zippy product? What went well, and what didn't? It's all in this short story featuring a serial side hustler. Stay tuned, the story's coming right up.

[Music]

C.D. Wang is what we like to call a serial side hustler. He manages rental properties, rents out cars through the platform Turo, and flips bulk items he buys at Walmart for profit. He has basically several of our most popular episodes rolled into one. And that's not all.

C.D. is also the inventor of Zip Scene, a DIY gadget that lets you tailor your baggy clothes in a matter of minutes, no sewing experience required. Four years ago, he was working as a chemical engineer, an engineer with a ridiculously baggy work shirt. He liked this shirt a lot, and it fit well in the neck, but in the chest and belly section, completely swallowed him up. It wasn't exactly a good look for him.

When he got home and rifled through his closet, it occurred to C.D. that his entire wardrobe could use a little tailoring. But shackled by student loan debt, a complete wardrobe makeover was out of the question. And his engineering education didn't include many classes in tailoring. So C.D. grabbed the challenge by the collar, literally.

To see if anyone else had this problem, he went to do some reading on Reddit. There he discovered that the struggle was indeed real. Baggy shirts were a borderline epidemic. He then considered what an ideal solution would look like. First and foremost, it had to be a temporary reusable solution, something that could easily be added to and removed from multiple shirts.

After all, this was the poor man's tailoring hack. And if the look he was going for was tailored, it needed to create a clean seam and be invisible from the exterior of the shirt. It should also be flexible and move easily with the wearer and the shirt itself. One day during his evening commute, C.D. was struck with visions of a C-shaped hollow tube that you could place along a seam and tuck in excess shirt material.

This might actually work, he thought. So instead of heading straight home, he made a beeline to Menards, the Midwest's answer to Home Depot, and purchased enough fish tank tubing to raise some eyebrows. A true man of industry, C.D. headed down to his parents' basement and got to work. He made a few prototypes using the fish tank tubing, a knife to create strategically placed cutouts for increased flexibility, and something to give the tubing a small amount of rigidity.

The first iteration he tried involved thin planks of wood. Ouch! He eventually settled on a more comfortable woodless version. Needing a catchy name, he called it Zipseam. Now that he had a product, at least almost a product, and a name, he turned his thoughts to marketing.

And with funds being tight, C.D. decided to launch on Kickstarter with a goal of $2,500. The first day, without any advertising at all, and largely thanks to good videos and photos he took, he was $2,000 closer to his goal. By the time the campaign ended, Zipseam had received attention from the likes of Gadget Review and a handful of other media outlets. The attention drove more than 3,000 backers to his campaign, leading to over $59,000 worth of funding.

It was a smashing success. You might say it had him bursting at the seams. He turned a nice profit because getting everything started and running on Kickstarter cost him less than $500. Of course, now he had to deliver the product. In the beginning, C.D. intended to build

each Zipseam by hand. But after a week or so of continuously cutting into plastic tubing with a knife, he realized there had to be a better way. He reached out to some manufacturers, local to his area in Chicago, and found someone who would make the first batch for him for $10,000. This had the added bonus of improving their production speed and freed up his time to create an online store. He knew he had a winner, but he was also concerned.

He couldn't even count the number of times he'd see something new on the market and thought, "Man, I thought about that years ago." He also knew that common problems lead to common solutions, so he decided to hire a patent lawyer to protect Zipseam from competition. This cost him another $5,000. Over the past four years, C.D. fine-tuned Zipseam, creating two new iterations that he launched again on Kickstarter. These brought in an additional $40,000, and since launching, he sold $150,000 worth of product.

He also received his long-awaited patent. Creating an ingenious and inexpensive solution to a common problem has brought C.D. a lot of publicity, and he's focused much of his outreach efforts around his Kickstarter campaigns. This was good in some ways, but also led to a big problem, because traffic dropped way off after the campaigns. In fact, he said, "The drop-off in traffic "after Kickstarter is substantial.

"I had no idea what I was doing "and couldn't keep the momentum going. "I definitely should have done something "to snowball the initial results." His advice to you, if you go down this path, is to be aware of that effect and have a plan for maintaining momentum after the time-limited attention dies down. And as for him, he'd like to continue growing the Zipseam business and launch another product in the near future. And if possible, he'd like to avoid using more planks of wood as prototypes. [Music]

All right, lots of good lessons here.

First and foremost, got a plan for that Kickstarter effect. That Kickstarter effect is like an Adderall or energy drink crash. Things are going so well, and then all of a sudden, you're like, "Where's my source of traffic? "Where are my buyers?" So it can be great while it's happening, but I think it's probably even more important to create that long-term plan. Now, I took a look at the website for Zipseam, which overall I think is great.

I do have a couple of comments. First of all, the promise I think is fantastic. The promise is the Zipseam now lets you tailor your baggy shirts in minutes for around the price of a cup of coffee. That is just a wonderful benefit statement. Tells you what the product does, tells you about the benefit, tells you how much it costs.

My one concern is, looking at this product, it seems like it takes a fair amount of work. So people who are into DIY stuff, like that's their thing, I get it. But those of us, myself included, who are not good at fixing things, assembling things, et cetera, were kind of put off by this a little bit. And that's almost what every testimonial on the site kind of reinforces. So I'm gonna read you a couple of these testimonials, see what you take away from them.

First one is, got these in the UK a couple days ago. It takes a bit to get them arranged just right, but they do work. Here's the next one. My Zipseam's arrived. They're simple to install, although I think it's gonna take some practice getting them right.

And here's the third one. I received my triple pack today and instantly I put them to good use. After about five minutes of trial and error, I can happily report these things work well. My army uniforms have never fit me better. Okay, so good testimonials from happy customers.

But when I read these testimonials, it just kind of reinforces my concern, as opposed to reassuring me. Because when I read these testimonials, what I hear is it takes a bit to get them arranged. They're simple to install, but it's gonna take some practice getting them right. It took some trial and error. Like when I read five minutes of trial and error, I think five minutes of trial and error for someone else is at least 20 minutes for me, like at least.

I know this from everything I've ever tried to put together from IKEA or anywhere else, like I'm just not good at it. So it may very well be that I'm just not the target market. Like the target market has to be somebody who is into DIY stuff and I totally understand that. But if it is in fact actually really easy, like if it really is easy, if it really is something I could do, then I wonder if there couldn't be some testimonials that essentially reinforce that fact. A testimonial from someone who's like, you know what, I was a little bit nervous about this because I'm not good at putting things together, but they showed up and I put it on my dining room table and I got it to work right away.

And it may not actually be that easy, right? But if it is or if there's some way to reassure that concern, I think that would help people like me who might be a little hesitant. Still $150,000 in zip seams sold and he received a patent. So huge success there. Congratulations to CD.

Can't wait to see what he comes up with next 'cause it sounds like he's got lots of projects in the works all the time. Listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. To find the show notes for today's episode, including links to Zip Seam, anything else I mentioned, fish tank tubing, et cetera, just come to sidehustleschool.com/843. That's for episode 843. Much more is coming up.

Do come back tomorrow for episode 844 and beyond. Thanks so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.