This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What is it with Australians and swimsuits? We have done at least two stories of Australians making swimsuits and being very successful with them, including episode 864, finance guy makes bank with swimsuit line. And I was also looking back in the archives and I saw episode 439, engineer makes blinged out bikinis for fitness models. Now that person wasn't Australian but uses Swarovski crystals in her bikinis. Well, in today's story, when an Australian university student is in need of money, she starts a bikini side hustle that grows to be far from itsy bitsy.
In fact, it grows into eight different e-commerce shops and a million dollar business that she leaves university to run. How does she do it and what can we learn? She is one of many people who've had success with e-commerce, in particular by working with an overseas factory and using Facebook ads to market to customers. There's a whole industry of people doing variations or different versions of this model. And this story is our latest case study in the series.
I'll give you a couple of e-commerce tips at the end of the episode. So stay tuned. Aussie student starts million dollar bikini biz. That story is coming right up. [Music]
Anna Gavia was working her way through university in Australia.
Her studies kept her busy. Anna only had $200 in her bank account. She needed to find a way to make more money and fast. But rather than getting another typical job for a student, like waiting tables or working in retail, she was drawn to e-commerce, especially the world of fashion. Although she had no experience in entrepreneurship, she was excited about the idea of starting her own business.
The little money in her bank account meant that Anna had no other option but to start her side hustle on a budget. So even though she was interested in fashion, she learned through research that to produce just one dress, it could cost close to $50. That would be 1/4 of the total money she had. So casting that idea aside, she began to wonder how she could still have a fashion business but with cheap startup costs. That's when she realized that the less material her items were made of, the less they would cost to produce.
So what's an item of clothing that doesn't include much material? Well, bikinis, of course. Not only were they cost effective, Anna had grown up on a coastal beach town and had gone through her fair share of swimsuits. She knew exactly what worked well and what didn't. With the idea in mind, she began her first design.
She made sure to include two critical features, adjustable straps and underwire support. After that, she found a factory in China that was willing to send her a single medium-sized prototype of her design. Once she received it in the mail, Anna spent about $5 on Facebook ads, just $5. A day went by and she hadn't sold a single bikini. Then a few more days went by.
It was total radio silence. But finally, on the one-week mark, Anna got her first sale and she was ecstatic. She repeated the process, getting more single suits, making more small purchases on ads, and soon she was receiving even more orders. After doing this a while, Anna booked a flight to China to check out the factory that she was working with in person. Satisfied with the way they were producing the suits, she decided to invest the money she made from her online shop back into the business for an order of 100 swimsuits.
And this decision paid off literally. Soon she began to work on more designs. She put them up on her website and once again advertised them on Facebook. The social network ended up being a very powerful tool to test out these new designs because Anna could quickly see which ones were the most popular and therefore more likely to sell well. This was especially important because with such a small budget, she had to be conscientious about where to invest her money.
By now, even though she was making the right calls, she still wasn't making a ton of profit. When she took a deeper look, she realized that although she was selling a lot of suits, they were simply priced too low to make up for her production and ad costs. So Anna decided to raise her prices from $29 to around $40 or $50, depending on the suit. The price hike allowed her to continue to advance her product while earning a better margin. As her store called Pink Colada continued to grow, Anna found herself wearing all kinds of hats, not just bikinis.
She was a designer, photographer, marketer, bookkeeper, and more, describing it all as a beautiful struggle. Rather than become overwhelmed by all the new roles she now had to fill, she looked at it as a puzzle and relished in learning all kinds of valuable skills. Eventually, Pink Colada became too big for Anna to run while attending school. So she put her studies on hold to pursue the business full-time. Although she originally set out to find a way to make money on the side while at university, her store exceeded her expectations and became her main career.
Over the past two years, Anna has grown Pink Colada into a million-dollar business. She dove into the world of entrepreneurship headfirst without much money or experience. And by taking action without overthinking, she was able to create an online store and course-correct along the way. [Music]
For everyone out there interested in e-commerce who likes the idea of doing something like Anna did, a couple lessons here, a couple simple things. First of all, when you design your site, or when you get somebody to design your site, or when you choose a template, whatever it is, you definitely wanna think mobile first.
Your checkout process needs to be as simple as possible to work on someone's phone. A common problem with designing, using a laptop computer or desktop computers, you're used to looking at it there, so you don't really think about the mobile experience until later. With e-commerce in particular, you should think about mobile on the front end. Now next, for e-commerce, you wanna highlight promotions and make them obvious. If you go to a fashion website, almost always, if it is well done, you're gonna see a big pop-up, a big banner, a big display that's like, this is what is 25% off, this is what is on sale, this is what is limited quantity, this is what is new, this is what is trending, and so on.
Just make it really obvious, make it exciting, make it seem like it's something special. Now also, you probably know about collecting email addresses, which is good. You should do whatever you can to collect email addresses. You should also collect birthdays. Some retailers are really good with this.
If you provide your birthday, then either, you know, on your birthday itself, you're gonna email with a coupon or a discount code, or I think it's even better to actually do it a few days before. Send an email saying, hey, we know you have an important day coming up. You know, we wanted to give you something special. Here's a gift, or a discount, or whatever it is. And this is a process that can be totally automated, by the way, it's not like you have to manually remember to go and email each one of your customers, or each one of the hundreds, and hopefully thousands of people that you have that are gonna be signing up for your site.
Also, speaking of giveaways, I was doing some reading to see what some other small retailers, you know, just individual e-commerce merchants were doing, trying to learn from sites like Amazon and Sephora, and other really big retailers. And I came across this example of someone who was inspired by Sephora, 'cause if you go to Sephora.com, and you're buying some products there, or just looking at the process, they do a good job of offering you free samples, which you can choose and select with your checkout process. So this retailer decided to do the same kind of thing. They were selling beach blankets, and they gave away meditation bracelets with a bundle deal. And the cost was so low that price-wise, it was like giving a small discount.
And people really wanted that free product, they wanted that meditation bracelet, so they would buy a bundle deal with three blankets just to get it. So ask yourself, is there something I can do with giveaways, or freebies, or incentives, or bundles, or similar? We'll put some more tips up on the show notes page. Thank you for listening as always. That show notes page is sidehustleschool.com/979.
I'll be back tomorrow. Much more is coming up, including a weekly recap as we advance toward episode 1,000. That's right, it's coming up, my friends. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
