Do you think you have what it takes to go on Shark Tank and showcase your side hustle? Well, I'm going to tell you a story about how one side hustler did something very similar and wound up on Shark Tank with this business. And I'm talking about PATE8. Now PATE is the founder of Happy Feet, which is a shoe wear company and they sell these oversized sleepers. They have now been kind of licensed and they've made them into all kinds of shoe models with like NFL, national sports teams, different kinds of things that they've done licensing deals with as well as Disney to use some of their characters on their shoes. So these oversized sleepers that are really super comfortable and now they've kind of licensed with a lot of different businesses and brands. So you can get them in whatever kind of style and brand that you like. If you like, you know, baseball, then you can get your favorite baseball team on there. Or if you like basketball, then you can get them in those kinds of different sports. If you like Disney and their characters, then you can get, you know, that kind of brand on your Happy Feet shoes. But let's go back to how this whole thing started out as just like a side hustle. So it's something that you might just be doing on the side. And what PATE was actually doing back in the day, he was selling coffee. So from coffee to e-commerce selling shoes, just by way of, you know, doing this on the side. So the way the thing he was doing was his main business was coffee. And you know, that's what he was selling. But kind of like when that was kind of like in the, in between stuff, in some of his time, he was kind of experimenting with, you know, retailing different kinds of things that he could sell. And as the story goes, it was actually his father that discovered the shoes that would get them in the shoe business. Like this was, and so what they did was they, you know, they kind of just sell that when not selling coffee, when, you know, when, when things kind of were a little bit slower, or, you know, they didn't have, they wanted to take a little bit of time off and sell something else. And that's what they'll do is they will try selling these shoes. And what happened was this shoes actually took off, right? Like you, you managed to get a lot of orders. And they kind of realized like, okay, there's something here. And so what they did was they were selling in these more chiasks around, around the country and, you know, started out small, but eventually kind of grew this around. And they got a bit of a brand reputation, bit of built up a bit of a brand from that with this happy feet brand. And these shoes are probably where a hit. And so what happened though was that they got a lot of orders. But as you might know, in e-commerce inventory is something that takes you money. And you kind of need big pockets at a certain level to really scale because each time you anticipate big orders, you have to kind of build up inventory and you're not necessarily going to get the money right then from your customers because you haven't sold the stuff yet to anticipated rising demand. It's only after you sell the stuff that you get the money and then you cover your out-of-pocket cost that you have spent maybe 10 months ago to buy and order the inventory. And so this is where if you get into a rapidly growing e-commerce season, you might eventually face e-commerce, I mean like cash flow challenges and that's something to be aware of. And this is something that happened to happy feet as well. And that's how he then ended up actually going on shut tank. And he was looking to get an investment, I think it was $375,000 for maybe 15% or 20% of his business and managed to get one of the shocks to actually invest. And so that actually helps, right? Like you get a big chunk of cash and that helps fulfill and build up inventory and smooth those cash flow challenges that he was having in his business. And appearing on shut tank is also great because he actually got a lot of national exposure. You're being featured live or national TV like that's an amazing opportunity and something that you want to do if you can get that opportunity for your own e-commerce business to actually be able to get that type of publicity. It's a good thing for your business, a good thing for your brand. He was actually able to get a lot of brand lift from that. And he's had media appearances, big TV shows, and the deal did open up a lot of opportunities like they were then able to do these licensing deals with Disney, with different sports franchises, with different well-known brands and be able to do licensing in a way that helped the brand help happy feet and kind of spread their influence even wider to where now a lot of people got to know about the brand and got to know about them. And so that's basically the story of how, you know, aside Hasla managed to turn his e-commerce into something quite large with nationwide recognition, nationwide appeal and a well-known brand. And there are a lot of lessons you can take for your own e-commerce store. You know, like if you look at some of the moves that Pet made along the way, like he set up some initial influencer marketing programs, he actually got Snookie from Jezshor, the reality TV series. He actually managed to set up an influencer deal with her where she would feature some of his designs. But she actually got to design her own custom shoe and so kind of, you know, based off of that, this shoe was then able to really sell out, like really, really quickly just based on her personal brand recognition because as a celebrity, you know, she kind of had a big mission-wide audience and people just love buying things. If a celebrity turns up and is wearing or endorsing some kind of product. So again, those are moves you can make. You don't have to be a big national brand. You can, you know, you can be just a side hustler, but you look around, you find some smaller influencers on Instagram or TikTok to rock your designs or rock your product and, you know, you can get exposure to your store, exposure to your shoes or to your bread, whatever you happen to be selling in your e-commerce store. So there are a lot of moves in what Pet Yates did that any e-commerce side hustler out there can actually utilize to get more sales of their own products. And if you need even more help, you can grab some of my free downloads. The links will be in the description.
