My Niche Design & Manufacturing Company Went From 0 to $15K In 6 Months
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hello, my name is Grier Govorko and I am the founder and designer behind Bentolabs. My company specializes in designing and manufacturing modern, stylish flatpack furniture and other designery items.
I aim to create timeless designs with a focus on aesthetics and use high-quality materials to ensure that Bento pieces have a long and happy lifetime.While the offering is small at the moment, I have a ton of designed and prototyped pieces that are sitting in the wings waiting to take flight (no pun intended).
I use Shapr3d as my primary tool to design everything. It's a very intuitive and powerful CAD software, so I want to give a big shout-out to the team behind Shapr3D. I also create prototypes using a CNC machine in my workshop. This allows me to focus on what I'm good at – the creative process – and leave the manufacturing to experts. After the creative process, I work with a team in Vietnam who produce the final goods. They have been fantastic to work with.
I have been working on designs aimed at providing solutions for vinyl record collectors and buyers. The Aurala50 is a compact unit that can hold up to 50 records next to a turntable. As a part-time vinyl collector, I found it very convenient to have easy access to my favorite records right next to my turntable, and I believed that others would also find it useful.
In addition to the Aurala50, there is the Aurala120, a modular shelving system designed specifically for vinyl. It can hold up to 120 albums per unit and the units are stackable. The thinking behind this design was twofold. I wanted to create a storage solution that could grow along with a vinyl collection, and I also wanted to address the issue of space.
Not everyone has endless space, so the Aural120 allows for expansion as you go along. These units can be stacked or placed alongside each other, giving the user flexibility in how they organize their collection.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
My partner and I had another business called Little Elephant Tonics - these amazingly strong health shots based around an Indonesian drink called Jamu - we’d been running it remotely from Bali. We decided we needed to be closer to New Zealand, where we produced it, so we shut down our Bali house and returned to New Zealand and then…COVID hit, which killed Little Elephant Tonics due to the lockdowns, which in New Zealand were pretty draconian and lasted for what seemed like forever. We got stranded, and our business got killed.
Being back in New Zealand and essentially starting from zero, I needed a new bed-base. I looked around online at the time but couldn’t find anything that I liked in a price range that I was comfortable with. So, I decided that designing my own was probably the best solution. And so, I did.
A large King-size bed base that could be assembled quickly by one person and used no hardware. No screws, hinges, nails, nothing. Almost five years later, the base is just perfect. I wouldn't change a thing. That bed-base was the genesis of Bentolabs.
My background has always been design-related before the Little Elephant business. I had been the Red Hot Chili Peppers production designer for years, and that requires a pretty specific design skill set—namely, everything that gets built for a set or a stage or whatever also has to get un-built daily, packed back into cases, and moved to another location. This sense of impermanence has been hard-wired into my brain, it seems.
The combination of life on the road and designing things inherently designed to travel or get deconstructed and reconstructed resonated with me.
My first love has always been design, and Little Elephant Tonics died an early, untimely death, so I set out to create Bentolabs, which I guess was driven by equal parts necessity and inspiration. Bento is a reference to the ubiquitous Japanese ‘quick lunch,’ which I love and feel was an appropriate name for things that go into a box and labs is obviously labs.
In the first month, I did about $1200 in sales, $4700 in the second month, and $8000 in month three, and hit $15K in month 5 or 6.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
Aurla120 was the first Bentolabs product I designed. I’d designed and prototyped a bunch of other things, desks, coffee tables, shoe racks, you name it, but I felt that I needed to start with a niche that was outside the box (no pun intended). I settled on Vinyl Records as a niche where I thought I could improve on what was already in the market and provide a product that helped collectors.
For me, the design process is always kind of a long and winding process; for example, I started with a small side table, which I probably iterated on five or six times, and once I got to a place I liked and settled on it, some of those same ideas or solutions, or aesthetics find their way into the next piece - it’s iterative, but it’s not linear, at least not for me. So Aurala120 came out of working on a table in an aesthetic direction, and then the vinyl niche came out of researching and pondering a space in the market.
So, that’s the basis of how I approach the design element. Then, how does it go from me taking a design and turning it into a product/business? That’s a whole other mindset—change hats.
I formed the company in Hong Kong, an excellent place for someone who likes flexibility. You don’t have to be a resident, and there is a flat tax rate and no taxation on profits from sales outside of Hong Kong. I found an agent in Hong Kong to create the company. It costs roughly USD 500 from memory to incorporate and open a bank account.
That got the company up and running. Bentolabs is trademarked, and I use Trama to do all of these trademarks these days. Gone are the days of looking for a trademark lawyer - Trama has a set price and global registrations. Tip of the month right there!!
With Bentolabs, I knew I wouldn’t be making the final pieces. I cannot produce at any scale alone, so I needed to partner with someone who could. This presented a challenge—I didn’t have contacts in furniture manufacture, but I have tenacity and dogged determination when it comes to solving what is solvable.
I went on Alibaba and searched for manufacturers in Vietnam. I knew Vietnam had a huge furniture industry, and after maybe six emails and back-and-forth conversations, I found two factories that I thought could help. After you’ve found suppliers via Alibaba in the past, you develop a sixth sense of who seems good in those back-and-forth emails.
Thankfully, my gut turned out to be right on this occasion. We did everything by email, back and forth with drawings and renderings, and the factories produced samples and shipped them to me in New Zealand. Finally, after we settled on a production price, I flew over to meet the Vietnam team. We made the first 200 pcs, put them on pallets, and shipped them to the US.
One piece of advice for anyone manufacturing products using outsourced factories is to visit the factories in person. Seeing things firsthand is beneficial, and I always gain valuable insights during these visits. I get to observe their operations, capabilities, machinery, and skills, and almost always, I learn something new that I hadn't been aware of through emails or video calls. It's always worth the trip!
Describe the process of launching the business.
I launched on Shopify in August or September 2023, with Shipbob in the background handling warehousing and dispatch. I didn’t have a launch plan other than putting the product on the ground and starting to test ads. I had no mailing list, no pre-launch, nothing like that. I’m familiar enough with Shopify to build out a primary store pretty fast; I have a couple of go-to premium themes I know I can quickly get something close to how I want to see it, with enough flexibility on the backend. I run a theme called Impact, and for the last three or four stores I’ve built, Impact has been my go-to theme.
In the first month, I did about $1200 in sales, $4700 in the second month, and $8000 in month three, and hit $15K in month 5 or 6. I was running Meta ads between $50 and $100 a day. By month three, I had proof of concept and confidence in the idea.
I am risk-averse regarding capital outlay and tend to move slower than most people. I test and ponder, test and ponder some more. It’s slow, maybe too slow, but it’s how I work.
Regarding capital, I self-funded - I pondered for a long while whether to go the Kickstarter route, but after multiple conversations with agencies working in that space, I felt there was a decent chance that I could launch on Kickstarter. Still, the downside was that if I risked my startup capital on building out mailing lists and ads to promote Kickstarter, what if it didn’t work? All I would have done is sink a bunch of cash into promoting something that didn’t yield any results; of course, the flip side is it might have worked fine, but that’s a 50/50 call that I didn’t feel was worth the risk at the time. I reserve the right to try in the future, though.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Advice to anyone launching a product: in my experience, sticking to what you know is key. If you’re bootstrapping particularly, choose a platform that you know and stick with it. At least to start with. If it's Meta for ads, then run with that; there are tons of options, TikTok, Google, Pinterest, whatever; it’s a veritable feast out there (Hemingway reference), but just because they’re there doesn't mean you should use them.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but I tend to stick with what I know I can do to make it work. You must be pragmatic if you have limited resources from a capital and a human standpoint.
For me, it’s Meta. I know how to get things up and running pretty quickly, but I don't with everything else. I dabble in them, and 99% of the time, they are not worth the time or money…for me because the learning curve is either too steep or the cost to learn too high, so resources get stretched too thin.
I’m a huge believer in email lists. I know everyone says it, but building an email list of customers or people interested in your business is powerful. Get familiar with Klaviyo, work on writing well, use good, original images, and don’t overload people with stuff—keep it conversational, helpful, and informative. Over time, it just works.
PR-wise, I have always done my own -, that’s not 100% true, I have retained PR firms in the past, but I am always bootstrapping, so that is a luxury I generally don't have. With Bentolabs, I haven’t done any PR or outreach, but when I do, I’ll follow the exact blueprint I have used. In 2010 or something like that, I designed a set of powered speakers called Q Speakers.
They were really beautiful, and I needed to let people know; I reached out to Uncrate, Design Milk, Apartment Therapy, and several other design-related blogs, and several ran pieces on Q. From that, I got a ton of inbound traffic. Those speakers ended up being sold in-store at Ralph Lauren’s Black label store in NYC - they came across them via one of those articles.
So, I can say that PR has been valuable in my experience, and you can do a lot of groundwork yourself. Research, build a contact list, and reach out to people. You never know where things can go - I also designed a crazy techno bed once called Somnus neu -and got featured in Fast Company - this was all through my outreach: a computer and an email.
Learn by doing. Try things and avoid getting too caught up in what anyone else does. Assume that everything will take twice as long as you think it will, and remember that there is no such thing as a straight path.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
In 2024/2025, I plan on making Bento full-time. 2023/2024 was test, build, test some more. I have solved most of the startup concerns. I have costs to a place that works once you factor in production, freight, cost of acquisition, and everything else. A bootstrapped business needs to focus on margin—without that, you're dead in the water.
As I said somewhere, I had a hypothesis about the Aurala120 units: They are designed to grow with someone's record collection. I’m starting to see multiple repeat purchases from people who bought a single unit a few months ago; now they’re back to get another one—which is really what I had hoped would happen. So that makes me feel good.
I felt I should test Amazon at some point during the last year but have since decided against it—it feels like everything is stacked against a small seller. While it appears to offer some benefits at first glance, though building the Bentolabs brand, I am happy to stick with Shopify, Meta, and Klaviyo.
Constantly work on getting the COA in the zone, build out the mailing list, and devote more time and effort to a regular newsletter, with design being the primary subject matter.
I’m adding new products to the mix and putting stock into Australia and the US. The ability to have international warehouse solutions is remarkable, and running everything from one storefront is fantastic. I live (currently in New Zealand), manufacture in Vietnam, warehouse, and sell in the US and Australia. So, new items, new locations for 2025, more dedicated email building, and Meta driving eyeballs.
I have a target: I want to see $50,000 to $80,000 a month in gross revenue in the next 12 months. If I can hit that number, I’ll feel like it’s working. If that happens, I’m unsure what the next step will be—probably some form of funding.
Whatever it is, I have to return to my original aspiration/desire—a design-based business I can run from anywhere in the world. All those years of life on the road won’t let me go; I like geographic flexibility.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Bentolabs isn't my first business, and there are always lessons to be learned. I tend to reflect on past experiences to identify areas for improvement. I either work on the things I wasn’t good at or discard the things I didn’t like. This iterative process is the creative part of business: testing, learning, and applying the lessons to the next endeavor.
I've started outsourcing a lot more with Bentolabs. I used to try to learn and do everything myself, but now, with platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, I can find people worldwide with the skills I need. It's a great lesson for me to rely on this global talent network for tasks I'm not skilled in, and there are a ton of talented people out there.
It's important to have a good understanding of all the different aspects of running a business. For example, I can maintain proper financial records using Xero, draft trademark applications, do PR outreach, build a functional website, write emails, take photos… whatever. I'm trying to say that being a generalist is advantageous, as it allows you to understand every part of your business. I find this incredibly useful, especially when communicating with accountants, bookkeepers, marketing agencies, etc. Communicating in a common language across these different landscapes is advantageous, at least in my opinion.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
As I mentioned, I use the tools that I know best: Shopify, Meta, Klaviyo, and Xero, for the backbone of the business. I think, for the most part, this is where I have landed with the basics—I’ve tried loads of things over time, but this is the core and where I tend to come back to.
I also use Notion for ideation and notes, Shapr3d for CAD design and drawings, Illustrator for logos, Pacdora for packaging design. I use Clearit for US customs inbound freight, (which is really a useful tool I have to say), Trama for trademarks, Airwallex, and Wise for banking, Signwell for documents, Front for emails ( some of us thrive on having six inboxes!)
There’s probably more but this is my core tech stack for sure.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Like any human, I am always seeking insights, information, and education wherever I can find it. I keep my interests broad, so inspiration comes from all sorts of places. I'm currently reading Poor Charlie's Almanack, a collection of talks by Charlie Munger. I find Munger's mental approach to business endlessly fascinating and align with his sense of right and wrong in life and business. Another book I'm reading is Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, which is insightful but slightly depressing.
I have a constantly changing podcast list, but I have been listening to Sean Carroll's Mindscape for years because I am interested in the universe, and he always talks to interesting people. My First Million for entrepreneurial Inspiration. In our Time “History” a BBC podcast about human history.
Starter Story on YouTube because I am always amazed and inspired by the cool things other people build. They have a great list of people/businesses, and it's constantly growing.
I read a lot of blogs on architecture, design, typography, and copywriting, and lately, I've been exploring Japanese wood joinery. I also spend too much time scrolling through TikTok because you never know who will appear there. I've come across some great marketing people on TikTok lately.
Inspiration can be found in plenty of random places. I might get inspired by a line in a song, which leads me to a photographer, a movie, or a graphic design choice used by a business that inspires me. As they say, keep your eyes wide open. I’ve been using a platform called Cosmos recently to collect inspiration. It’s sort of like Pinterest, but its search algorithm seems stronger. I save all kinds of random stuff there.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
My advice for anyone looking to start is to learn by doing. Try things and avoid getting too caught up in what anyone else does. Assume that everything will take twice as long as you think it will, and remember that there is no such thing as a straight path—it's full of twists and turns. The more you try, the more you learn. As Picasso said, “Action is the foundational key to all success.”
I believe that curiosity is vital yet needs to be a more talked-about trait. Natural curiosity is an essential tool for entrepreneurs: asking questions, seeking to understand how things work, and being eager to learn and inquire.
Try to limit envy; it's a human condition but unhealthy. With all the social media, you mostly see the wins and hardly ever the struggles. Nothing gets built in a day, so you get a skewed picture and compare yourself to impossibilities. That's not good for anyone. Inspiration over envy!
Get plenty of fresh air, exercise, and don't fall into the madness of the idea that you must work 16 hours a day—because that grind is nothing but a grind.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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