Owning a small business looks like a whole bunch of hard work and success from the outside. But it is not what it always seems. We recently thought we had a super great idea, and we couldn’t wait to share it with our customers. However, it was a complete flop.
We decided to create a tribute to the 2020 seniors since so much was taken away from them with Covid-19. We were seniors 2 short years ago and we couldn’t imagine our senior year without our prom, project grad, graduation, and other events that got cancelled this year. Thus, we came up with the idea for the Senior Bundle. It came with a tee, hat and sticker. The hat was a little play on words as it said graduation cap even though it was just a normal ball cap. We just wanted to help brighten 2020 seniors last hurrah.
We had never made hats before so it was a risky endeavour to begin with. Once we got all of our supplies we tried pressing the hats using our shirt heat press, but it was a HUGE fail. We ended up ruining over half of our hats because we really wanted it to work out. At that point we had a decision to make, either move forward without the hats or find someone with a hat press. We were so grateful a friend of ours reached out to their mom so we could borrow her hat heat press! We grabbed the remaining hats and pressed them with the hat press, but most of them didn’t turn out in the right way. We only had two hats left that we could sell. We went ahead and listed the 2020 Senior Bundle on our site and we sold both of them! However, we had quite a few shirts and stickers left over. We tried to sell them separately, but no one was interested.
We took a risk on this launch and it was a complete fail. Luckily, we made our money back, but we made nothing off of it. We also decided to repurpose our unused white shirts, and we made them into our Far Out tee, which was a huge hit!
At the end of the day our failures are what help us grow and learn. Our experience as business owners wouldn’t be the same without all the bumps in the road. It is a tough journey to drive but it is well worth it all along the way.
ttyl,
Al
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