Product Collabs Helped Her Jewelry Biz Hit $20M in Annual Sales

0:00Hey, business besties. It's Jasmine. I am the host of the FEMA Founder World Podcast and the person behind the entire FEMA Found World Universe for brand builders and business owners. It is so nice to chat to you again. Today, I'm speaking in person from the studio with Adriana Carrig, the founder of Little Words Project. When you first hear about this business, she sells beaded bracelets. You kind of think, cute little small business. No, Adriana has built a company that she bootstrapped to$20 million in annual sales. I am not talking about$20 million in sales over the last 10 years of business.

0:39She hit that number in one year last year. It is amazing. She's since taken a little bit of outside investment, but she did most of that fully bootstrapped herself. She makes these bracelets that have little positive words of affirmation, and she is an absolute pro at blending purpose and profit. And this is a phrase that gets thrown around just so much purpose and profit. And I don't think a lot of people really understand what it means or how to do it. But Adriana is somebody that just really clearly articulates how those two things are interconnected and just create the snowball effect to amplify each other.

1:21She's also a total pro at building community. The people behind her business who champion what she does are just diehard fans. I think everyone who's building a business would love to have the kind of community around their brand that Adriana and her team have been able to build. So we talk about this in the podcast. Plus, you know, she's collaborated with Barbie and Duncan. Celebrities like Taylor Swift wear her brand. And there is like this amazing story there that we're going to get to in the show. You need to hear it. She's also sold in over 900 stores, including 12 bricks and water stores that are literally her own Little Words Project boutiques.

1:59They're incredible. She's super inspiring. I love chatting with her. We're going to get into the show in just a second, but first I have an announcement. This is the first time I have shared the date of our first ever Female Founder World Summit. It's coming to New York City on, drum roll, 9th of December. It's a Saturday and this is going to be a conference. But if you know Female Founder World, if you have seen our events on TikTok and Instagram, or if you have been to one of them, even better, you know that we do not do conferences in the way that maybe some other people do conferences. This is going to be engaging, interactive.

2:39We are going to give you a notebook and you are going to have it filled with plans and dreams and actions and strategies and phone numbers and Instagram handles of people that can go and help you implement that. It's going to be an incredible day. As always, our events sell out very quickly. I'm expecting this one will go quickly too. I'm going to share it in the newsletter very, very soon. Right now, we do not have waitlist. We do not have tickets available, but as my very favorite podcast fam, I wanted to let you know 9th of December, Mark your diaries. Clear the day. I'm going to see you in New York.

3:17Okay. Let's get into the show. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host, Jasmine Grinsworthy. Adriana, welcome to Female Founder World. Hi. Thank you for having me. This has been a long time coming. It's truly, I mean, we were just saying we've been talking since you had just become pregnant when we first started chatting. And now he's eight months. And now he's eight months. Yeah. And we've been really trying to make this happen since then. I, I've been admiring your like bracelet stack and your manicure and like, I just, this is sad. No, it's motherhood. You can see it is motherhood.

3:51You can also see I have, I spent like the weekend with a four-year-old and I've got this like random pink left over nail polish. So you're really inspiring me to step this up. I know my one thing I will say, I am like such a nail girly because I'm my whole, my whole shtick is in the wrist, right? So like, I have to have it looking good. I mean, it looks amazing. Thank you. Little Words Project, you started in 2013. You were in college. Talk me through why the business came about, what the vision was when you got started. Yeah. So I was actually, I had just graduated from college when I started, but I did start a version of the brand while I was in college.

4:28I wanted to create something that was all about kindness and self-love and women supporting women. And I had grown up myself dealing with a lot of negativity from others and just really wanted there to be something that existed that kind of like infringed on that cruelty that so many of us so often experience both at a young age and honestly through adulthood. You're talking about bullying specifically. Bullying, but also just, you know, cruelty, like female competitive cruelty. Like that exists, you know, above and beyond the bullying like cafeteria, right? It goes into college, into work life.

5:05I mean, so many of us I know can identify with that, just feeling that in social media, like it could be a nasty place. So yeah, I really wanted to create something that was about kindness and positivity. And so that's where the bracelet came into play. It's really meant to be a vehicle more than anything else of that kindness. And the idea is you're supposed to wear them for as long as you need it and then pass them on to someone who needs it more. So it's this really lifting you up, passing on kindness, spreading positivity and self-love and all that. So yeah, it started at, I was 23 years old.

5:38I started in my parents' basement, just making these bracelets again, always with that community builder in mind. And fast forward 10 years and here we are. Amazing. What are some milestones that you've hit along the way? I mean, pretty much every milestone you can hit as far as our first wholesale accounts. We are nationwide in Target, 900 doors. We are sold in Nordstrom's as well. We have our own retail store fleet. We'll have about 12 stores, Little Words Project owned stores by the end of this year, hopefully up to 20 by next. We hit 20 million in revenue last year in one calendar year. So we've done obviously way above and beyond that.

6:20But last year was 20 million. This year, hoping to land around 35. So really seeing that growth. Thank you. Wow. It's insane when you think about it because it is a$25 product, right? Yeah. That's a lot of bracelets. It's a lot of bracelets and we have a lot of SKUs and it's a very complicated business. And I share all that. I'm a very open book, but I share all that because I think it's very hard for people to wrap their heads around sometimes, how a business like ours could stand on its own two feet without, you know, a ton of outside capital investment, without a ton of - Also, no outside capital investment until last year, this year?

6:57Until early this year. Yeah. We were completely bootstrapped from the very beginning. And, you know, I think that story goes so untold. It's really not the main story that you hear about. you hear about these crazy like flash in a pan, incredible businesses that come out of nowhere and have millions and millions of dollars backing them. We did not have any of that. It was completely bootstrapped. We were lucky to be profitable month one. That said, I only invested like 5 ,000 into the brand and I launched right before Christmas of 2013. But it's been self-sustained ever since. Okay. So you invested 5 ,000 of your own money and that probably went into what?

7:34Buying the product, creating some content? What were you doing? Exactly. It was buying the material and I was very much so making every bracelet myself. I had not navigated like a factory or anything, manufacturers, anything like that. I did that for two and a half years. I made them myself with the people that helped, obviously. It was making the prototype, buying the materials, making a video. And from a very early stage, I recognized that this was going to be a marketing company more than it was a jewelry brand. It was meant to be a community building brand and not just something I could make and sell on Etsy, which there's nothing wrong with that.

8:11There's so many incredible makers on Etsy, but I actively chose to go the website route and not the Etsy route. So yeah, getting someone to make the website, getting someone to make a video that I could market it with, getting someone to help me with the development that would be needed for the registration tag, which is another component of the brand that you use the bracelet's code on its tag to connect the bracelet to our website. And at the time, I had someone building an app to really make that work, right? Because that was a huge component. That was the X factor, if you will. It wasn't just a product.

8:50It was something that had this like unique angle to it. So yeah, pretty much getting my, the trademark registration lawyer and making sure I had the trademark at all kind of encompass that$5 ,000. It sounds like you knew early on that this was going to be a thing. Like you're, if you're setting all those foundational pieces, I think a lot of people kind of, especially when you're thinking, oh, I'm just going to, I'm just going to start a jewelry business and make it myself. They might kind of, you know, do it for a little while and see how it goes and then reverse engineer and put that structure in place.

9:20Did you know that it was going to be something big or were you just like hoping for the best and fly? Yeah, I was definitely flying by the seat of my pants. But like I said, I really led with the marketing first mentality. And I think that came from I interned in marketing. I was working in marketing full time at the time. And when I started the business, I actually would come home at seven o 'clock at night and make the bracelets that I had gotten orders for that day and get them out the next morning. My dad would help me ship. I was full-blown working in marketing at the time. It was experiential marketing, small agency.

9:51So I had the marketing mind and that's still very much so where I live now as the CEO and kind of almost functioning as more of a CMO than anything. But that marketing concept of it being, how are we going to tell the story? Why does the customer want this? How am I going to pitch it so that they want it? And that's where the intentions around the kind of website we had, the kind of videography we did, the kind of storytelling we had. It was very intentional. And yes, this is before Instagram, like Instagram had just started. It was before like the influencer as a concept that had also like, it was very, very early on.

10:30I'll never forget like when people started posting. I remember the way people reacted to like influencers at the time. It was very like, you know, negative. And then fast forward, they're like running. I was a fashion editor at the time. Okay. So I was 2013. I was 23. I was just about to move to New York. Oh, exactly. And Ellie. Are you a 1990s baby? Yeah. I love a 1990s. What month? May. I'm April. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God. Cute. That's why we were. Are you a Taurus? No, I'm an Aries. My husband's an Aries. My husband's a Taurus. No. Stop. God bless us both. That's so funny. Okay, okay, Mitch.

11:08Love that. I love that. um I I remember this time I remember when I remember going into fashion week when I was you know 23 in Australia and I remember the bloggers like coming up and it was when they were just starting on Instagram and they were very it was very like a snooty like yeah these yeah who are these um yeah yeah it's like why are they here and now they run the world literally Oh, yeah. You were like so made fun of back in the day if you were posting pictures of yourself. I was a digital editor as well. So we were like, you know, a tiny little tier above in the view of brands and publicists.

11:47But still, it was back in the day where like a print editorial magazine that was top tier. Oh, yeah. I remember that was my dream. I wanted to work in print magazines. Yes, we all did. That was the thing I wanted to be in. Yeah, 100%. So yeah, I think the story really was just I wanted to create something that had a purpose and a mission. And when I had that in mind, it really helped fuel how I showed up for the brand. So I always, yes, did I always believe that it would be something big and that it could get there? Absolutely. And I think if you don't believe it, then no one else will. That's like my number one, actually it's my favorite word is believe.

12:25So I did believe in it. And now that we're here, I'm not shocked so much as I'm just like, I'm freaked out by how time has passed. And like, I'm very, very mindful of fact, it's been 10 years this year. And I'm like, oh my gosh, a full decade doing this. And wow, it's worked is the feeling I have. What were some early signs that it was working? I'm really interested in your timeline. Like what was that first, you know, big partnership or that first big retailer or the moment where you kind of switched from, this is a small little thing I'm doing to know this has legs to be a company that's doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue a year?

13:04Yeah. So I think it was really the first few early partnerships. I think I saw very early on that the partnership angle and slotting Little Words Project into those partner communities was going to be a great way to build community and to almost provide. It's like we plug in this really authentic brand community angle into anyone we work with. So it was a very simple plug and play concept in my head where my first actually big activated partnership, if you will, was with Always Brand. And it was during their Like a Girl campaign. I don't remember this like eight years ago. It was like fight like a girl, hit like a girl.

13:48They did this really cool viral video campaign. It was a commercial, I think in the Super Bowl at one point. And I just loved it. And it was so us. And they reached out to us wanting to do bracelets for one of their events with Google and Maisie Williams was the speaker. And it was just a very cool opportunity. And I remember thinking at the time, like, if we can just replicate this across multiple different verticals, multiple different brands, branded moments, it's really such a seamless, meaningful giveaway moment for guests that come to events. It's a meaningful moment for community engagement and activation for people who want their own communities to feel like it's a part of something bigger and connected to something bigger.

14:35So I think it was like that partnership that really kind of helped me. And that was, I was still in my first apartment doing it with one full-time employee. And, you know, it was a studio in Jersey City. Like I lived, my bed was in the same room as my office, you know? So it was early on that I knew that, okay, if we could just keep replicating this throughout. And collaborations and partnerships have been a major, every single collab and partnership has been a pivotal moment for the brand that's just kind of helped us continue to scale the ladder. And this year you collaborated with Bobby. You just collaborated with Duncan and I saw that sold out in like five minutes.

15:14Well, it sold out in the first day, but we bought it like under six hours. But we bought it to last through the weekend. We intentionally wanted it to go longer. So it, it five X'd what our expectations were and how quick it went. Um, certain sizes, certain styles were out even faster than that. So it was definitely a huge, incredible collab where we're, we really are mindful when we launched these exclusive drops. We don't want to be the brands that like they hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, and they only have a hundred and you're like, okay, well that doesn't, that doesn't promote community. It's not fostering like inclusivity and the ability to be a part of what you're selling.

15:55So for us, it's like we are always very mindful and like, yes, we love the concept of selling out in five minutes, but like we're buying more than 100 units. You know what I mean? Like we're trying to make it that so that everybody could get involved in this and be a part of it. And also, I don't know, I think from like a best, like a good business practice is like if you're going to launch these exclusive drops, you're going to launch a collection and you're going to put time, money and energy into the pre-launch stuff and like the marketing of it all and the photography, like the amount that goes into getting something up live on the site, buy enough that your community can buy it.

16:30Yeah. You need to sell some stuff. Yeah. But I understand hype culture too. And I don't think that that's a negative. I think there's a nice little balance to find. For people who want to follow this path, they want to build a brand that can really sustain these kinds of partnerships. How do you structure? I'm sure you've learned so much over the years about how you structure these deals so that they work for everyone. What are some tips that you have? What are some things that you guys have put into place? So we really just try to get an understanding of what the partner is looking for as well.

17:01So like, what are their goals? Like, how do they define success for the partnership? And then once we can kind of define what those parameters are, are they looking to just, you know, plug our product into their community? They need a meaningful giveaway. They need something for their event, you know, whatever they want to have a bracelet making activation on site at their event, finding out what their goals are, looking at what their reach is, determining what our goals are and how do we pair the two. So for some of the partnerships, you know, we've worked with Nike's Women's Summit out in LA with Nike Women LA and we had a big bracelet making event.

17:37This was a few years ago. It was also one of those pivotal like, aha, we're onto something moments. I think it was about five years ago now. Um, but they wanted, it was our first bracelet making activation that we've ever done. And it was like, okay, this is something we can replicate and do. So just again, understanding what do they want? What do we want to get out of it? And then where do you draw, you know, where do you land as far as like what you're going to charge and what you're there, maybe are they expecting you to pay them, you know, in order to work with them? And is that common? It happens here and there.

18:08We typically don't sign up for that. You're a media business. We're a business. Exactly. And so if you want us to be a part of your event, we are going to come correct. It's going to be the best event. It's going to be the best experience. Your customer, your consumer, your guest is going to walk away feeling like they just leveled, like their life was just a little bit leveled up. We are a value add. So we always, we charge to be at places. We charge per product. There will be times where if it's like the right collab and the right moment where we feel like they're going to bring us more value than we're going to bring them, we'll be like, all right, we won't charge you and we'll pay for our own flights.

18:50But we are, you know, but we're, you know, we're not going to pay you anything at all. And then there are times where it's like, okay, maybe, but it's very rare. I mean, we were working with like Campoosh didn't pay. You know, we've worked with people that you would be surprised that we did not pay to do. The last time I paid someone to do something, I paid Create and Cultivate like six years ago in the early, early days. And it was worth it. And I'm glad we did. But I've been very like shy to do that again because, you know, you are a business at the end of the day. And I feel like you're bringing so much to the table now as well.

19:24Like you have – I said the comment before about you being a media business because you have reach. you have community, you have this really strong brand. You're not just selling a product in their space or offering that activation. You are offering the brand alignment. I'm offering the brand alignment. We're offering the community. The community is so organic and authentic and honest. It really is very much so a community first. And that's where when you asked me earlier if I knew that this was going to work and that this was going to be something big. And the answer is not the bracelet, but I knew the community was going to be something big.

20:00I knew the value of community. And remember, this is started by a girl who always sought and wanted community. So I knew how to create it and I knew what I wanted. And I knew that there were other women like me who wanted the same thing. This is so inspiring to me as a community-led business. Yeah. Community is such a big thing. And it's what so many brands have, like you said earlier, reverse engineered to include that piece after they've seen the wave of how important that is for brand building and business building. And I just feel so grateful and proud that we started honestly from the very beginning with this as the core thread of who we are.

20:42And it's been woven throughout the last decade. So yeah, it definitely is something that came from desire, need, want and it filled a hole that I think we were one of the first movers to do so. And the bracelet's always only ever been a vehicle to do so. It's just so happened to be great that the product look and feel also took off. I will take a little credit for that, honestly, because, you know, it's definitely something that was not a vibe 10 years ago. It was always fun for like our age. Yeah. Because it was what we would make in like summer camps when we were kids and making them yourself.

21:19And even if that's continued, but I remember distinctly when I first launched it, people were like, are you sure you want them to look like that? Like that's kind of childish. And I'm like, no, trust me, this is like, it's the look it's coming back. And I mean, and this is a wave that's happening at the moment as well. I feel like it's just also built, like added so much momentum as well. Yes, absolutely. The momentum has been fun to ride. Okay. I want to talk about, um, your very specific partnership deck, like what kind of things are going in there? What are you including to communicate value to brands?

21:52Like what advice you have to somebody who wants to go and put together this kind of document to take to do these brand partnerships? Yeah, I would say making sure that you have the specific value adds that you feel your brand brings to another brand. So we have both, you know, we kind of started off with like, who are we? What is our X factor? Why do you want to work with us? And that's including like the whole background story, me, the authenticity of it all. And then who we've worked with in the past, whether it be partnership focused or influencer focused. And by influencer, I mean, not just like the standard, you know, your typical influencer, but also the celebrities that are influencing their communities through what they wear and how they respond to the product.

22:40So we've got, you know, we're regularly showcasing that, you know, Alicia Keys wears and loves the bracelets. We've had some other incredible celebs that I won't go through the list, but incredible people that love the product that we always make sure. Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. I think we need to call out Taylor Swift. Well, Taylor Swift. She's worth a mention. That was, yes, you're absolutely right. I'm trying to be mindful of how often I, like, use her name. Right. But it's true. And it's, you know, recently we had Lance Bass give the bracelets to Taylor Swift on the VMA stage. And it was like the craziest moments that we've had, you know, to date, probably one of the most pinnacle moments of my career because it felt like, you know, Taylor Swift has come along and become the friendship bracelet, quote, has become very much so her thing through her concerts.

23:28And, you know, that's partially a little, you know, it was a little not frustrating, but a little like scary because it's like, oh, no, is this going to just completely take over everything that we've worked for for the past decade? And in some ways it did, because obviously there's always going to be those diehard fans that didn't know about us and think that we are grifting off of her. But what actually happened is when Lance Bass knew that we were the original branded version of this product, I'm not saying I'm the original bracelet that you and I have been making since we were five, but the branded product that came back onto the scene, he gave that stack of bracelets to Taylor.

24:03And in that moment, he took it back for us, right? He like stamped it as we were the official one. How did that come about? Lance literally is just, he's my president. He is the most incredible human and soul. And he knew, and this is where the partnership and always saying yes and being open and doing what you can to make something work. If you believe it's a brand adjacent, like good brand builder for you. We worked with Lance and his team for the Aaron Carter Memorial event that we had done in LA. I want to say it was a year and a half ago now. and Mariah, who is my like go-to right hand, like she is pretty much the face of the brand at this point.

24:45She's been with me since, you know, seven years now. So she's like almost employee number one. She went to that event and she connected with everybody there. She became true friends with them. So powerful. Brought her, what we bring, which is the true kindness that, you know, comes along with our brand, real friendship, community connection. And stayed in contact with him and his team. Fast forward to, you know, he's going to the concerts. He wanted Little Words to be the bracelets that he wore and passed out. So we made that happen. And then fast forward even further to the night before the VMAs.