How to grow your business from side hustle to best selling product in four simple steps

Creating a successful business from scratch is no easy feat. In fact, starting a business in the first place can be rife with enough challenges that could make you want to run in the other direction. There’s a myriad of tasks that can fall on the founders’ shoulders that sometimes getting the business to the next level can feel out of reach.

So how can you move your business from side hustle to best-selling? We chat to Georgette Hewitt, founder of best-selling brand Sky Gazer on how she did just that. Sky Gazer were named a bestseller on Amazon USA in 2020 and have sold 75,000 units in Australia alone thanks to a continuous stream of 5-star reviews.

Starting a business? Create a lifestyle not a brand

One of the hardest things to do in a business is getting people to buy into your brand. Sure, they might make a one-off purchase, but you want your customers to become loyal followers and brand advocates who purchase time and time again. That’s where creating a lifestyle, rather than just a brand becomes incredibly important.

If we look at some of the big-name brands like Apple, Nike or Adidas, we can quickly see what kind of lifestyle they’re selling and who they’re trying to sell to.

This is something I thought long and hard about before landing on many aspects of my business. For example, I wanted Sky Gazer to be synonymous with the Aussie lifestyle, but not just be another towel brand. The Aussie lifestyle shows through in things like the names of my towels (each towel is named after an Australian beach), but I also made each towel versatile, for example, our XXL towel is big enough to also be a picnic blanket and our smaller towels are also perfect for the gym.

Think outside the box

Rather than starting a business that might look like a carbon copy of another successful business, think outside of the box. Consider how your brand or eCommerce business can be different from all the rest, even if it’s just one thing that sets you apart.

When I was creating Sky Gazer, my first thought was to create a towel that was sand-resistant. But truth be told, there was already a couple of brands on the market that sold a sand-resistant towel.

I did some market and anecdotal research into what future customers actually wanted from their beach towel and found that there were a few areas that hadn’t fully been tapped into. For example, having a place to store your items on the beach (such as keys or wallet) was a common gripe, as well as lugging a heavy, wet and sand-ridden towel back home was another.

That showed me that my towel needed to be all those things – lightweight, sand-resistant, quick-drying, but also showed me that I needed to add the MVP – our wet bags. Each Sky Gazer towel comes with its own matching zipped wet bag which means you can store your possessions in it or the towel itself. This has proved to be our point-of-difference that keeps customers coming back. Consider how you can do this for your brand by thinking beyond just the product you’re selling and what your customers truly need.

Collaborate with other brands and businesses

For some businesses, collaborating with other brands can sometimes feel on the risky side, especially if it feels like you might be giving away some of your IP or creating a direct competitor. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Look at ways that you can safely collaborate with other brands, whether it simply be through a giveaway or something more in-depth like a new product.

In the early days of running Sky Gazer, I received some requests to create custom towel prints for some corporate brands. Of course, I was a little hesitant at first as I wasn’t sure how I could facilitate it all but getting the chance to work with some big-name brands was something I couldn’t pass up.

I now offer this as a regular service to corporate clients or regular customers (so long as minimums are met). We collaborate with brands to design bespoke sand resistant towels which fit inside a matching neoprene bag that they can offer to their customers. We’ve since worked with the likes of Sofitel, Optus and Virgin Atlantic on creating unique towels that work for their own brand exposure.

This kind of collaboration has massively built my networks and put Sky Gazer towels in front of some incredible customers! Don’t be afraid to reach out to like-minded, but non-competing brands to start a discussion about how you might be able to work together to leverage each other’s customer base or networks. Sometimes it might take a cold call or an email out of the blue but you never know where that first introduction can lead to!

Place an emphasis on Marketing and PR

Marketing and public relations can really be the make or break of your business. They are elements that you need to invest in, or alternatively, learn how to do yourself. Learning a whole new skill (that often takes a 4-year uni degree for professionals to complete) is no easy feat so consider what you can do yourself, and what you need an expert for.

Also know that marketing and PR don’t just give you overnight success. Oftentimes it is about the long-game strategy that is going to give you the best results. Whilst marketing can yield some overnight success, consistency really is key and for PR, you do need to set aside a few month’s worth of budget to see results.

Many publications work on lead times which means your public relations professional might pitch out your brand in November but you won’t see it on the pages of a monthly magazine until February or March (given that many monthly magazines work on a 3 to 4 month lead time). My advice would be to allow at least 3 months budget for PR and put aside marketing budget every single month.

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