I Quit My Job & Started A Business With Just $10K. Now It Makes $240K/Year
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi, my name is Jamie Taylor and I am the founder of Confetë Party. We make it easier to build relationships and celebrate life’s most important moments with our curated gift boxes. You can gift in three ways; our Ready to Ship gifts are designed by us to make it easy to send a gift in a pinch. Our Build a Box which is arguably the most popular way to buy a gift on our website because you have complete control over what goes in the box and the price point you would like to stay in. Finally, our Corporate Gifting has skyrocketed since COVID. Businesses and entrepreneurs are trying to find better ways to connect with their employees and clients in a virtual world. We work with them directly to create branded gift boxes for client retention efforts, employee morale, and any other events they want to celebrate.
Currently, our main customers are large corporations, real estate agents, business coaches, and event planners. Anyone who values their clients + employees and wants to provide an experience and value they don’t see from their competitors.
We’ve worked with businesses such as Microsoft, Facebook, AARP, and Boston Consulting Group and have steadily grown our business to over $20,000/mo in sales.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
To say the path to where we are today has been a straight line would be a complete lie. I always wanted my own business but never really knew what it was. I had a background in Interior Design and loved being creative. I finally decided to double down on figuring out what it was and hired a business coach to help me find clarity. I realized that I had forgotten how to dream - you know, like the way you did when you were a kid (hello WNBA). I originally started an event planning business in 2015 after helping plan events for friends and family. From day one I had a full expectation of launching an e-commerce business centered around making it easy for people to celebrate. The original idea was a party-in-a-box where we would design instagrammable parties that had cute backdrops, plates, cups, and decor items and they would all fit in the box with a style guide. This didn’t take off as much as I’d hoped but our balloon installations did and I ran that wave. I learned so much through this process and it brought me to the doorsteps of some of the most prominent people in the world.
Fast forward and it’s 2020 and COVID has brought events to a screeching halt. We had plans to scrape the party box business come June because all of our time was spent designing installations. At the time I had a team of 4 and we quickly pivoted to our e-commerce business and tried to figure out what we could offer because at the end of the day, while in-person events stopped, those celebrations were still happening. We realized people were going to need a way to celebrate while distanced. We launched our Virtual Party Box and that took off like crazy that it even caught the attention of the New York Times when we put together a virtual graduation box. From there we shifted our focus to celebratory party boxes. We wanted to bring the party to you if you couldn’t party together.
If it wasn’t for our Custom Party Box which we had from day one we wouldn’t have known what people were wanting. We were getting real-time feedback from customers about what they were wanting. This was how we grew our inventory as opposed to buying products we weren’t sure would sell.
I am an all-in kind of person and so I quit my job and went into this full-time from day one. It was incredibly hard and I had to budget and re-evaluate my finances because I was married and had an 8-year-old son. We were completely bootstrapped and started the business with $10,000. What I learned was how little money I did need to survive. When you’re passionate about something you have no problem cutting back on your luxury expenses such as eating out. If you’re not then you’re probably not passionate enough. I started this company out of my garage and finally in 2022 decided to leap getting a warehouse because the business continually took up more real estate. That was a major milestone for me.
Start throwing out ideas on what you might want to do and listen to your body. It will tell you what you’re excited about by expanding and what you’re not by tensing up.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
From day one I knew we wanted our products to be high-quality with a splash of fun. I wanted someone to say “YAY” every time they got a box on their doorstep. My goal was to source our products from as many small-medium-size businesses as possible. I wanted products you wouldn’t see walking into Target or shopping on Amazon. The fun part was designing the boxes. The initial design process is to sit down and identify why people give gifts; birthdays, job promotions, new babies, hard week, or a new house to name a few. What themes do people want; coffee, spa, cocktails, and housewarming? I then identify what kinds of products we would like to see in those boxes. Because we are an online business the colors, style, and overall feel of the box are important to us. It’s the face of the company. Most of the time it’s our company's first impression to people and we want it to be a good one. We source our products through Faire, local shops as we travel, research online, and reach out to them directly. We taste test everything which is a perk but we always want to make sure that what we’re putting in our boxes is something that we would eat or drink ourselves.
What made us different from our competitors is that we wanted to be fun, bright, and modern. Having things in our boxes such as noisemakers and confetti was a huge hit and something you don’t see in any other gift box company. It’s almost like a nod to our past party boxes and it’s something everyone wants in their box.
If I had to choose one thing that was the hardest would be sourcing the shipping boxes at a reasonable price and our website. We started with white Uline boxes with a custom-made stickers and graduated to full-color printing boxes quickly. We originally sourced in the states but to reduce the price of the boxes so customers could spend more on products in the box we sourced a vendor from China via Alibaba. I’ve heard stories of people not being happy with it but I interviewed a few, ordered samples, and landed on one supplier. They’ve been amazing to work with and we cut our box cost in half.
Our website is our storefront and I wanted an easy and seamless ordering process for our clients. The biggest issue we ran into was that you could buy products on our website in three ways; pre-curated gifts, build a box and shop the market where you can buy the product without it being a gift. This created an inventory issue because we needed one main inventory system that would integrate into each of these pages to pull products when someone placed an order. This would allow us to hold lower levels of inventory for each service. It may seem easy but as I mentioned we bootstrapped this and e-commerce websites are not cheap. Last year we finally pulled the trigger to redesign our website to solve this problem and improve customer user experience. So far we’ve had great results and it will now allow us to scale and grow our business and ensure we can fulfill orders.
Describe the process of launching the business.
We have grown mostly organically and are just now starting to implement a true marketing strategy. We focused our efforts mainly on Instagram, Pinterest, and our blog. Because we were the only company doing Virtual Party Boxes and that word was on our website we found ourselves #1 on Google and that drove a lot of traffic. The New York Times wrote an article on our Grad Box and that was great exposure where we saw a 20% increase in our sales.
Now that our product has been tested organically with the clients we have, we are implementing a marketing strategy that will target that audience mainly through our emails, Google, Pinterest, and Instagram which is where most of our traffic comes from. We are looking at in-person events as well, especially as we gear up for the holidays.
I started the business with $10,000 of my own money and then the rest went on credit cards. We designed our first 6 boxes and went live. Our inventory was small but we steadily grew that with every custom order we received. That is still how we continue to grow our inventory - based on what customers are requesting from us. I feel that our steady growth has allowed us to understand who our client is and now it’s time to take it to the next level and target them specifically.
I’ve learned a lot but one would be patience and to stop overanalyzing your initial product. We don’t even have the same boxes we originally started with. They’re constantly changing. I also would encourage you to find a way to get customer feedback. Dissatisfied customers are my favorite because without them we don’t hear what customers are unhappy with. So many people will just stop buying from you without saying anything. Those customers provide us with an opportunity to get better. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to be flexible and be willing to pivot from your original idea based on economic times and customer feedback. Without that, we would be out of business.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
If you’re a solopreneur such as myself I would recommend writing down all of the tasks you do for the day and creating jobs from each of those tasks. Then sit down and create an organization chart so that as you grow you know who and what to hire for. This has helped me be more organized and easily hire someone with clear expectations of the job role. I have one full-time employee and mainly hire subcontractors at this point.
We are just getting started with paid marketing. We’ve done a few boosted posts. We’ve noticed that videos and photos with people tend to drive more engagement than ads with just our boxes. We’ve done some boosted posts but mainly we’ve grown through SEO which I attribute to our blog. We also paid the website company we used to help optimize our website when we relaunched. We also have a marketing calendar that we’ve created ourselves that identifies high-level items we want to post on certain days. This helps target our ads and ensure we’re hitting our pillar marketing topics. We haven’t found anything that gives a calendar for all your marketing content such as emails, blogs, and social media so we created it ourselves so we can see a holistic view of our monthly content.
We’ve had traffic driven to us in a few ways; past relationships that we had so we continue to network in our local area even though we’re technically an e-commerce company, the article in the New York Times so we are creating an outreach program to partner with bloggers and features in large publications.
We post every day with a goal of 2-3 reels a week. We send emails out to past customers on new box launches, sales, and company updates. We provide a 10% off promo code for your first purchase. When customers opt into this they are then put into a 5 email welcome series campaign that welcomes them and explains the ways they can start gifting, the second email tells them about how we got started, and the third email we have one day 15% off discount code and the email showcases different reasons to gift, the fourth email focuses on our corporate gifting options, and the final email encourages them to connect with us on social media.
We aren’t on Amazon and don’t plan to be at this time. I think it’s a great choice for manufacturers, makers, and people who want mass-produced items.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Our gross margin fluctuates depending on expenses for the month but we sit around 30%. We roughly get around 1k visitors a month and they spend on average 5 minutes on our website. We have 1,200 monthly email subscribers and 5,500 social media followers. All of our orders come directly from our website with half of that organically coming from Google.
We are currently ramping up for the holidays which is our busiest time of the year. We are in the design phase of our boxes which consists of a meeting with the team to discuss items we’d like to see, products we’re missing, and popular themes, and we usually will do a fun poll on social media to get customer engagement on what they’d like to see in a gift box for the holidays. We are expanding our product offers and plan to offer more price-pointed gifts. While we sell all over the country our current focus is Washington, California, and Arizona. We will continue to expand our paid marketing to other markets as we grow.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
When we did our first large order we priced out the shipping on the boxes before getting the addresses from our client. That was a hard lesson learned but we made it right, got the boxes out and we made it a policy to always get emails first before shipping large orders. I also feel like we didn’t spend enough time trying to understand who our target customers were. Now that we have real-life data we have identified who our audience is and can tailor our products and offers to them. Creating your client persona is so important to creating content that speaks to them and draws them to your business. We underestimated this as we naturally got customers organically but to grow and attract it is necessary.
What I am most proud of is that we’ve been adaptable to the changing economic climate and listened to what customers were wanting. I am proud that I took $10,000 and made it into a business that brings in $20,000 a month. I’ve learned a lot about myself and what I am capable of doing. If you have a low budget my advice would be to set up an easy content plan that you can keep going to stay consistent with your audience, if you’re on a budget search for local events where you can showcase your product to your audience, and get your systems in place. My final advice would be to start before you’re ready. I can find myself in analysis paralysis as a perfectionist but you have to push yourself through that and know that it’s not set in stone. You can make your product better, your emails better, and your posts better. Just start.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
The tools we use:
- Shopify - Website
- Klaviyo - Emails
- Canva + Photoshop + Indesign - create marketing material and emails
- Trello - client/project management
- Google Drive - files, photos, and anything our team needs to access from anywhere.
- Planoly to schedule social media posts
- In short - create reels + videos
- Studio + Canva - social media posts
- Bench - Accounting
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I love podcasts. I would listen to How I Built this because I was fascinated by the paths people took, the adversities they faced, and how they adapted. I love Goal Digger Podcast, and Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Once I took the jump I realized I was more capable than I gave myself credit for. It’s scary jumping from a 9-5 to do your own thing with no safety net. What I realized was that I can always go get a job if this doesn’t work out. Meaning, what would I be losing out on? I’ve gained more experience through this process than I ever did in any job I was at. I think the most important thing you could do if you’re thinking of starting your own business is to sit in a quiet place with zero distractions. Start throwing out ideas on what you might want to do and listen to your body. It will tell you what you’re excited about by expanding and what you’re not by tensing up. Next would be to sit down and write out what you enjoy doing. Do you like writing, do you enjoy being active, do you enjoy designing, etc. Then write down the activities involved with the business you’re wanting to start and make sure those activities are wrapped up in it. I think sometimes we have an idea of what something is but we haven’t imagined ourselves there.
Next, write out your ideal life for the next 2-3 years. What are the major milestones that will make it feel real? That way when you achieve them you know you are working towards your vision.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are not hiring right now but within the next year plan to hire an Operations Manager. We are looking for stellar marketers to work as subcontractors. We want someone motivated, who comes to us with ideas on what we should do, and who is familiar with Klaviyo and email marketing. We are also looking for a digital marketing person.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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