This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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In today's story, a savvy stationary site offers greeting cards for divorce and Diwali, among other things. It's all about an associate director of a nonprofit college of music who creates an e-commerce site selling greeting cards, and not just any greeting cards, but cards with a twist, or just a different sort of message than you might see on your typical corporate Hallmark card. In the story, you'll also hear how she makes a big change, transitioning from a consumer-focused model, or B2C, to more of a wholesale-focused model, B2B. We'll talk a bit about the pros and cons of that. By the way, welcome to Side Hustle School.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. Every day, I'm bringing you a different story of someone who is creating a project, an income-generating project, not just any kind of project, but one that makes money using a skill they already have and without quitting their job. The show is seven days a week, 365 days a year, coming to the end of our second year, and it is completely free to our listeners. We're able to do this because of a couple of quick, short sponsor messages per episode, usually from companies offering something valuable or a special offer to our listeners. So I appreciate them making that possible.
Here is one of those messages, and then I'll tell you the story. [Music]
Allie King is the Associate Digital Director at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It's a nonprofit and one of the most selective music schools in the United States. Allie also runs the e-commerce site, Groundswell Greetings, selling greeting cards with a twist. She enjoys the thrill of discovering quaint, independent boutiques.
The originality and flair of the cards found in those shops usually surpasses those that she would find in her local grocery store aisle. In fact, for years, whenever she'd find herself looking down the lonely abyss of a drugstore greeting card aisle, she would sigh, roll her eyes, and question the meaning of life before storming out an indignation. Okay, that is a slight exaggeration, but the point is she was disappointed. Mostly she was underwhelmed by the mass market selections being offered. Those cards were out of touch, low quality, and lacked personality.
She began giving serious thought to the idea of making her own cards. As she put it, greeting cards made sense to me because they require little capital to get started, yet make up an $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone. I felt I could differentiate our brand with unique designs that represent a more diverse, modern audience. Well, Allie's card topics are as diverse as the groups they represent.
She has cards for same-sex weddings, Diwali, Ramadan, cards for a new pet, and even divorce cards. One of them reads, "Heard about the divorce. Congrats on the weight loss." In short, she's trying to tap into groups that are underrepresented in the greeting card market. She began by reaching out to local female artists and designers. She told them she wanted to build a community in support of the arts and women in business.
These mastermakers were looking for additional places to showcase their work and agreed to come on board. Groundswell Greetings launched in April 2017 with the mission to create an affordable alternative to the underwhelming card options in drugstore aisles. And she originally focused the brand toward consumers. Trying to raise brand awareness and sell more cards, she created massive lists of tasks to tackle. It was a lot of work.
But then, after winning Philadelphia Magazine's Best of Philly award for stationary last year, she had unexpected interest from stores who wanted to carry her brand. She had initially planned for that direct-to-consumer assumption, or B2C, business-to-consumer, but found the wholesale side of the business to be more sustainable and easier to manage, at least so far. While her wholesale margins are lower, she's getting free marketing by being exposed to their customer base. It turns out that having fewer and more meaningful relationships to manage, as well as following up with other small businesses who are actively interested in partnering with her, just made sense. Now, her advice to somebody else considering taking this leap, she says if she had the woman power and the time, she would try to grow both distribution channels.
But for now, she's got that full-time job, she's got other stuff she does, so she's excited to really invest in these wholesale relationships. She also suggests learning as much as you can about your industry peers and competitors before you start. She says that most people will talk to you, buy them beer, buy them coffee, give their business some social media love. There's probably at least one thing you can learn from each person or company. Now, the wholesale model is not a one-size-fits-all.
In a lot of ways, Allie is making it harder for people to get her cards, but hopefully the trade-off there is that by having those cards on the shelf and lots of different stores, she's able to reach more people. In terms of pricing, she's kept the price at $5 per card, and the stationary industry is very seasonal, all right? So in terms of profits, she rarely loses money, but a number of months have been break-even. Yet her biggest profit months are between $3,000 and $5,000. That would be $3,000 to $5,000 per month.
She recently launched her own rewards program, Club GG. Allie is excited to see how the wholesale pivot continues to develop. She'd like to grow her brand beyond Philadelphia, starting with Pittsburgh and Washington DC, if possible. She also still loves her day job and is invested in learning as much as she can there. Her boss is supportive of her entrepreneurial pursuits and sees her side hustle as a benefit to the office.
It seems safe to predict success is in the cards. [Music]
All right, here is a fun fact and actually some additional advice from Allie. She's very helpful in sharing lots of information with us. Thank you so much, Allie. She says she used to stalk people in that dreaded grocery store card aisle multiple times a week to see what they were buying.
She noticed what cards people were attracted to as well as their price points. She described it as being creepy but anthropologic. It says she did a lot of research in the wild. So listen, you can do a version of this too for whatever you're interested in and you can learn a lot for sure. I had a chapter in the side hustle book called "Become a Detective" where I gave a few other examples of a strategy like this.
And one of them was about a woman in Texas who has built a really successful part-time business looking after dogs. And she did this initially from the website rover.com which is the directory of dog sitters, essentially. And dog sitting can be a pretty competitive industry. So especially in a city like Austin, Texas where she was living, a lot of dog lovers there. And there was something like 100 or 150 active dog sitters that were listing their profiles and offering their services on Rover.
So, you know, she shows up, she's completely new to this and she found a way to get to the top of the Rover listings which is critical. If you're gonna go look at Rover or Yelp or TripAdvisor or any of these services, you're really gonna pay attention to the top, you know, 10. Most likely you're not gonna go beyond that. And really you're gonna look at the top three to five, right? So she was able to get to the top of those Rover listings by paying attention to what people who were ranked near the top were doing.
And she noticed, for example, that everybody at the top had a lot of photos but people at the top had like a dozen photos, sometimes even like 20. And then she noticed that the site tracks people's response time. So if you send somebody a service inquiry, how long does it take that person to get back to you? And you can see that on the site. So she noticed that the people at the top had a really quick response time.
This person gets back to you within an hour. That's a lot better than this person gets back to you tomorrow. So she set out to do one up on both of those examples. She posted something like 50 photos, like 50 photos of her with 50 different dogs, which in some ways is like overkill, but I can just imagine somebody going through the listings and like just clicking through and clicking through and like almost getting to know her through that process and therefore building trust and authority and becoming the one that they choose. Also, she really tried to focus on her response time, especially in the beginning when she's trying to like boost that algorithm up.
She tried to respond to everybody within five minutes. Like she always had her phone with her and if she got a message, she would just look down and send a quick reply because the system tracks that. So I don't know if she's able to do that forever, but the point is in the beginning she's trying to get to the top of the listings and that's what she did. So become a detective, lots of different ways that you can do that. The more you can get in the mindset of your customer, the more closely you'll be able to make your products to suit their needs.
So thank you for listening today. I'm gonna leave you with that. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Our show notes for today, including links to the awesome groundswell greetings are at sidehustleschool.com/707. I also wanna give a shout out to my friend, Emily McDowell, another person who does some unconventional and pretty amazing greeting cards.
She has a book called "There Is No Good Card For This" and will include a link to her work as well. Be sure you're subscribed. Much more is on the way. I'll be back again tomorrow with the weekly recap. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.
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