Part 4 of L.Eyes Eyewear

I remember hitting a lot of hurdles and some of them really major ones and it really affected me in a way. I would hit moment where i would say let's sell up! My wife would turn and say do you really want to sell up? I remember wanting to sell it for 35k and be done with L.Eyes Eyewear. The journey just got a bit rough and doing this side hustle was challenging. I think i put it on the market 3 times! We were even offered 18 bitcoin for it! 

Now my wife always likes to remind me about that moment. She would say "luckily you listened" or "Aren't you greatful you got me" lol. My wife and I make a great tag team. We both have different strengths and provide value in different ways. One thing that i am really strong in was creating easier ways of doing things. We had long processes that took a long time to package sunglasses. We would have to reassess where we were and ask ourselves how can we quicken the process? 

We use to write every single package slip, then we automated it. We would box and tape all our packages so we changed it up and bagged it all because taping would take ages. We knew if we really wanted to scale our business we would need to do things more efficiently because this was in fact our side hustle, we had a family, and we needed to spend less time on our business and more time on our family. 

In 2019 we saw some good growth but still not where we wanted it to be. Our goal was to allow my wife to finish work and have baby so we had a lot of work to do. We were consistant with our sales but we kept on selling out and our products took a long time to manufacturer. 

We looked at getting a loan to inject a bit of liquidity into the business to really make some moves as summer was approaching. We started planning our new stock and really putting some creativity into the new stock we had planned for summer. We took a gamble and ordered a few thousand pairs of sunglasses and it all worked out really positive for us. We were doing almost 10-15k a month in Dec, Jan 2019 on our side hustle using organic traffic, Social media and Influencer marketing. 

We saw the revenue start dropping off and eventually we needed to look into paid ads. Isaac John, Gary V, and Mike Dillard all spoke about using Fb ads as a way to market our brand but i had no clue how to do it. You tube had a lot of information but i really wanted to know how to do it. Theres the boost post feature and i did that a few times but i just wasted money. Plus i didn't have a FB pixel so i couldn't track the data needed to create retargeting campaigns. I eventually did a few facebook ad courses and really got a better understanding how to create paid ad campaigns. Im still no guru but i do have a slight understanding how to create top of funnel ads and bottom of the funnel ads. 

COVID 19 hit in 2020 of March and we made $7 profit in March! It forced us to pivot in our business to look at was to improve our business during a pandemic. In all of March i studied my fb ads material and in April we implemented our first paid ads campaign. I knew if everyone is locked in at home they would be looking at their phones wanting to spend the extra cash the Government was giving everyone! We started trialling campaigns and then ping, order, then ping, ping ping, the orders just kept coming in. 

We were lucky we had a bit of stock in so we kept selling and selling, scaling up. We got in touch of our manufacturers and we had to look at Pandemic proofing our business so we just ordered thousands and thousands of glasses trying to stock pile 2 years worth of supply. Ping, Ping Ping we kept selling and it was crazy to see the support from everyone. If we could sum up the many things we learned it was Consistency, and Persevere. We needed to keep going no matter the hurdle and we needed to keep going through all of the hard times.