Model Turns Designer With Travel-Inspired Jewelry

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

[Music]

What's up everybody? Welcome to Side Hustle School. So glad you're here. Gonna bring you a cool pivot pandemic story today. I've been hearing so many of these ever since, well, the pandemic.

People have been looking around and saying, maybe there's something different I should be doing. Maybe I can use this time to experiment or just, you know, try something new. So the jewelry market is a big one. It's valued at over $78 billion. The U.S. is the fourth largest importer of gold,

silverware, and jewelry of all kinds in the world, behind the United Arab Emirates, China, and Switzerland. So in this story, you're gonna hear about a fashion model who is stuck at home, not able to travel the way he'd been doing for his career. So he uses this time to create and begin selling a line of non-binary unisex jewelry inspired by his former travels. I think this is really cool. It's jewelry that can be worn by anybody.

Again, non-binary unisex. We're gonna talk about it. Model turns designer with travel-inspired jewelry. How did he get the idea? How did he make it happen?

What is the specific outcome? Like how well is it doing and what's coming up next? All of that is in this story. I'll bring it to you right after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]

Niko Milado is a Chicago-based fashion model who is used to a packed travel schedule as part of his job.

Remember those days? Well, unfortunately, most of that travel schedule ground to a halt last spring, as you know what happened. The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread across the globe. Like many of us, he was left to figure out some next steps. But luckily for Niko, he had something waiting in his back pocket, an idea for a side gig that was perfect for a situation like this.

You see, Niko happens to be a graduate of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He chose to pursue his passion for fashion, but never lost interest in what he'd studied. In the summer of 2019, he was looking to expand his wardrobe with more accessories, jewelry in particular. Much of what he found was too generic for his tastes or too expensive for his budget. There seemed to be a serious lack of product in the middle, a category that Niko later called semi-fine jewelry.

Thinking it through, Niko turned to his own interest for design inspiration and landed on travel, something that has been important to him since he was a child. After all, you've probably heard that millennials value experiences over material things. It's a bit of a stereotype, but there's also truth in it. And Niko chose to hone in on a marriage of two interests, jewelry inspired by global travels. He reached out to a friend and former business school classmate named Pat, who as luck would have it, was also in the market for a side gig.

In late 2019, Niko pitched the idea of his new jewelry company to Pat, thinking that Pat's experience in corporate America would nicely compliment his own background in the fashion industry. Pat agreed and they decided to start Atlas Jewelry Company. Now, if that sounds big, well, the initial investment was less than $1,000 with the bulk of that money going towards supplies and samples. Niko assembled each piece of jewelry by hand and he and Pat set up social accounts for the business. Niko did all the photography and they began with a soft launch for friends and family instead of a full rollout.

The pair arrived at this decision because of budget constraints and a small amount of initial product, but they were pleasantly surprised when their soft launch generated enough income in the first two days to cover their initial investment, eventually bringing in $1,300 in only two weeks. They kept the profits in the business, putting them toward their LLC filing, a new printer and a small paid advertising campaign. Niko described feeling a rush of excitement when that first sale notification came in from Shopify. While most of the early sales came from close friends and family, it was reassuring to see some purchases coming from distant acquaintances or people who only knew him online. Not everything was as exhilarating as that first sale, however.

The two friends officially launched on March 28th, 2020, just as most of the United States entered lockdown. They were unable to utilize some of the common growth methods a new fashion business might choose, like showcasing the jewelry on live models or even doing a traditional photo shoot. Instead, Niko used his sister and himself as the models and shot all the initial photos at home. One more challenge, earlier in the year, as he'd begun to look for sources, he realized that having pieces custom designed would be cost prohibitive and instead chose to source lots of pre-made components from ollyexpress.com, assembling them himself. The pandemic, however, disrupted traditional shipping schedules.

Many shipments and samples from China were severely delayed or never even arrived. Working through the setbacks, Niko and Pat continued to grow Atlas Jewelry Company following their soft launch. As the year progressed, they branched out and found new customers. They also began to cultivate brand influencers on social media, sending them free jewelry in exchange for social media posts and photographs of that jewelry in action. They set up an email newsletter and were able to host a pop-up event in Chicago that generated their biggest one-day sales to date.

Now, here's an interesting fact. The jewelry is designed to be unisex and Niko found that the majority of Atlas' early customers were men. So as the holidays approached, they decided to focus some of their advertising on women in order to continue to grow the company. November was their biggest month of sales, bringing in more than $8,000. That was great, but with the jump in numbers came some growing pains.

Niko and Pat scaled back their ad buys in December in order to address concerns about production lead times, operational efficiency, and mere product availability. Even with the decreased advertising, they still saw healthy sales grossing over $6,000 for the month. Looking ahead, their biggest goal for 2021 is to find a third-party fulfillment service, allowing the friends to focus more on growing the business and the jewelry line rather than personally packing and shipping each order. For Niko, having his modeling career put on hold during the pandemic turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It allowed him to bring the dream of his own jewelry line to life and gave him a sense of purpose during an otherwise difficult year.

Even with the setbacks, the reward of seeing others wear his designs while building a business with one of his closest friends has been well worth it. [Music]

Awesome, congratulations to Niko and Pat. It's always interesting to hear about businesses that have started in the midst of other difficulty or turbulence or whatever we want to call the year known as 2020. I also thought it was interesting that they have chosen to market this unisex non-binary jewelry and focusing their paid advertising efforts to women, at least at the end of 2020. To me, I tend to think, if it's mostly men buying this jewelry, I would double down on that.

But maybe it's the kind of thing where you don't have all the information yet since it's a new business. But in any case, I think the non-binary unisex focus is really important, especially with so much jewelry out there and so many people trying to sell handcrafted items. So best of luck to them. And listeners, if you wanna check it out, just go to atlasjewelryco.com or atlasjewelryco.co on Instagram. I will link it all up in the show notes.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Those show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1499. 1499, can you believe that? Tomorrow is episode 1500. Very, very excited to share that with you.

Thank you so much for being part of the journey. Oh, and if you have a comment or question for the show, that would be sidehustleschool.com/questions. All right, I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sidus for School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.