How I turned $200 into a million dollars (Part 1)

All my life I’d been an overachiever. I knew I wanted to be “successful” but I didn’t know how I planned to get there. I went to college, picked a major I was interested in (Psychology and Latin - doubtful the two most profitable areas to concentrate) and waited for the fulfillment and “success” to roll in. Spoiler alert- it didn’t.

As a Hail Mary I applied and was accepted to a PhD program in Clinical Psychology and thought surely this was the ticket! While I did enjoy many aspects of the program, namely teaching, I didn’t feel that this was remotely close to my life’s purpose and so I made the very difficult decision to drop out of graduate school and look for a “real job.” While I was hoping to find my very profitable dream job the 2008 economy had other plans. I ultimately found myself with a degree, living with my parents, and working at an unpaid internship. Although I felt incredibly humbled and slightly demoralized I resolved to take this internship as an opportunity to learn all that I could about the industry I was in.

Inspiration Strikes

While working at my (then meager paying) job in the shipping and logistics industry I was tasked with analyzing commercial invoices - basically, the receipts that show what an American company paid a foreign supplier for a shipment of goods. One of my accounts was a luxury high-end beauty retailer whose legendary perfume line hits the shelves for a range of $100 - $300 per bottle. One can imagine my shock when I found that they were paying their factories less than $10 per unit.

The markup! To be fair, I’m not sure that I knew the word “markup” or “profit margin” at the time, but at this moment I was about to dive head-first into learning everything I could about making a product for $10 and selling it for $300.

My Million Dollar Idea - would it work?

After that day I rushed home excited with my new knowledge - I had been in the wrong industry this whole time! I liked perfume. I liked beauty products. I could surely learn to make them, right? I opened my computer and logged onto YouTube, furiously typing in “How to make perfume.” A few short hours later I felt confident that I could not only make perfume, but market it, sell it, and ride off into the sunset toward my dream home.

I took all the savings I could justify using at the time (about $200) and ordered a set of 24 tiny little perfume bottles, oils, pipettes, and blank labels. I’d never taken a chemistry class in college, let alone a business class, but my fervor was undeniable. No sooner had my supplies arrived than I had whipped up a fragrant mix of roses, grass, Spanish moss, and a touch of dirt. I called it “Flower Garden” - truly original.

My next step was to figure out where and how to sell my creation. Around this time there was a fledgling website called “Etsy” where you could make and sell your products. “Sounds good,” I thought to myself as I hammered out a few photos with my digital camera and uploaded them to the site. I went to bed that night, barely able to sleep knowing that I would wake up the next morning with a full bank account.

That did not happen.

Where did I go wrong? I made the perfume. It smelled great. The picture was decent, even by 2008 standards. Heck, I even think I offered free shipping. Not willing to give up, and not wanting to spend a lifetime highlighting invoices I decided I had to go back to the drawing board.

Find out what happened next in Part Two.