We did $5,140 last month, the first month this looked like a business

Aisha Wright· DTC skincare brand for melanin-rich skin; first 300 units shipped· Open, E-Commerce & DTC·1w

DTC skincare formulated for melanin-rich skin, first 300 units shipped in the spring. Last month we did $5,140 and I have looked at that number in the dashboard roughly forty times.

Context so this isn't a brag without texture: the three months before were $900, $1,700 and $2,100, and $5,140 still doesn't pay me. Cost of goods is about a third, shipping is a bigger line than I want to discuss, and I spent $600 sending samples to people who post about skincare, two of whom actually posted.

What changed wasn't marketing. I stopped selling one product and started selling a two-step routine, because customer emails kept asking what to use alongside it. Same customers, bigger order, no new ad spend. The pair is $52 instead of $34 and it outsells either item on its own.

The unglamorous part: I packed 190 orders at my kitchen table across three weeks and my back has opinions about it. I'm now genuinely pricing fulfillment options, which is a sentence I couldn't have said in March.

For anyone sitting in $900 months, that was four months ago for me and it felt permanent. It wasn't. What was the first thing you outsourced once the packing got real?

4 replies

Maya Fischer· Named it·1w

The kitchen table detail is why I read this twice. I'm still on Etsy packing ceramics in my dining room, and the packing is genuinely the reason I've been slow to push for more orders, which is a ridiculous way to run a business.

Question about the pair: did you have to change anything on the store for it, or did you just list it as its own product? I keep imagining I need some proper bundling setup before I can test it, and I strongly suspect that's me finding a reason not to do it this week.

Aisha Wright· Open·1w

Listed it as its own product with its own photo. No app, no setup, ten minutes of work. The photo mattered far more than anything technical: two items in one frame with the routine written on the image is what made people understand it.

Test it this week. If it doesn't sell you've lost a listing and an afternoon. I sat on the idea for six weeks because I thought I needed to redo the whole store first.

Greg Foster· Open·1w

Congratulations. The three-months-of-$900 thing is real and nobody posts it, so thank you for putting the boring numbers in.

On outsourcing: for me the first thing wasn't packing, it was the two hours a day I spent photographing and listing inventory. I hired a college kid for eight hours a week to shoot and list, and my online sales went up by more than the hours cost me, because the bottleneck was never customers, it was that half my rack never made it online.

Before you go to a fulfillment company, price what it costs to have a person come to your kitchen for six hours a week. Cheaper, and you keep control of what goes in the box.

Dev Patel· Idea stage·1w

Idea stage here, specialty tea and coffee, still scouting locations on weekends, and the most useful thing in this post for me is the $900, $1,700, $2,100 sequence.

I've been building a plan where month one of the shop looks like month twelve, because that's the shape of every projection template I've found. Four ugly months before a $5,140 is a much more honest curve and I'm redoing my numbers with it this weekend.

Genuine question: at the $900 months, were you already sure it would work, or were you quietly deciding how long you'd give it?

Sign in to reply

Replying and upvoting need a free LaunchAdvisor account. Reading is open to everyone.