679: Free Inventory: The Sustainable Stuffed Animal Side Hustle

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1:14She's got a really creative resale business, actually getting inventory donated for free, and then applying some really savvy branding and marketing to build what she calls a sustainable soft toy adoption agency. She's saving the planet one teddy at a time from lovedbefore.london, Charlotte Liebling. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you very much, Nick. It's lovely, lovely to be here. I'm excited for this one. This is a big deal. Your kid outgrows their stuffies. There's probably 50 or more in the next room over there. They're still in okay condition, most of them, and a lot of donation places won't accept them.

1:50Parents, at a certain point, want them out of the house, so they end up in the landfill. I've got to get rid of them some way. I can't donate them. So you come in with love before and say, there's got to be a better way. with over 10 ,000 sales now, adoptions now, beautiful branding, retail partnerships. We'll get into all of that. But it started as a side hustle. You're working full time. You said there's got to be another alternative path here. Yeah, that's exactly it. I was actually volunteering in a charity shop at the time and I started to notice just how many donations people were bringing in of stuffed animals and often what are really big and sentimental and emotional moment it was for them.

2:32But as you say, the process as it was is these charity shops are really overwhelmed and thrift stores, charity shops, op shops, same thing. And they were going straight out the back and into the bin, unfortunately, or they were just sold as dog toys. And the memories that they came with and the love and stories were just thrown away in that moment. And that really struck me. I kind of went from there, really. Yeah. So you say, well, what if we could rehome these? What if we could turn to this, what is now unfortunately going to be garbage into give it a new life. And so what are some of the first steps here?

3:07Well, the actual first step in that moment was for me to go home and understand that that was a wider problem than just one that I was seeing in this specific shop. So I jumped straight onto Google that night and was kind of frantically searching, is this a widespread problem? And what does this look like on a global level? And I remember the walls were kind of covered in scribbles and crazy post-it notes and like mad scientist vibes I kind of had this brainwave of all right well if we can change the perceptions of them becoming rubbish and losing their value once loved then maybe we can make a real real difference in the industry and that's kind of where I went from there really and and I think I started with the most nothing nothing you can have apart from maybe a very supportive mum and dad and boyfriend who were kind of cheering me on.

3:58But, you know, I had sort of the five pounds in my bank account that I had at the time. And I was thinking, okay, well, how do I turn that into 10? And how do I turn that 10 into 100? And, you know, piece by piece, build up something here. But I would say what we actually started with was a community. And so before I sold anything, before I presented any kind of product or service, I put something out into the world via social media to validate that other people would connect with this and this would resonate with them. So yeah, I started with the community side. Was there any social following?

4:35This is just on your personal accounts at this point? I set up a whole new account for this and fundamentally what it was, was me and my little one bedroom flat with a few teddy bears just starting to talk about some of the things that were going through my brain and sharing some of their adventures and that kind of thing so it was separate from my personal account because I wanted to I think there's a lot of value in in building something almost secretly from the people around you you want to know that this is validated beyond your circle of friends who will support everything you do. And it has to have legs and those legs must be built in the real world.

5:17Okay. So do you have an example of what those first few posts said or looked like? Yeah, it was stuff like, because I guess there's a few elements of the concept or the proposition that needed testing. It was around, do people so feel as emotionally attached to stuffed animals and would people or are people looking for other ways to give them up or donate them that don't involve them going in the bin and so I guess I was introducing some toys as having character and talking about their name and what they love and personifying them and bringing them to life in a way to understand whether that was the kind of thing that, you know, would at all resonate and whether I was just this crazy teddy bear lady on one corner of the planet.

6:04And that's all it was. But it turns out I wasn't. Yeah, other people did resonate with this story and have it a big way since then. This is at lovebefore underscore London, almost 150 ,000 followers on Instagram at this point. But starting out with a brand new account from scratch, anything that you did to boost the post or get more eyeballs on it? To be honest, we don't put any spend into marketing. It's about storytelling, finding different and creative ways to emotionally not just tell people what you're selling and what they can buy from you, telling them stories, whether that's the stories of the brand or the founding of the business and all the background.

6:45When someone comes across your profile, they should feel like they have just met their new best friend. You have to go beyond selling into the depths of human connection. I think that for us has been the key. For your initial inventory, do you go back to that charity shop where you're volunteering at, or do you put the call out on these social channels to say, if you have a used teddy bear, somebody that is ready for their next adventure will will take it off your hands at the very very start i kind of piloted this in a small way with the charity shop that i had been working in and they you know gave us some of the inventory and i found they've accompanied them to a couple of market stores and that kind of thing and then i said okay well this is this is what leads and this is something i really want to develop as a sole entity and so kind of parted from them and then was left in this strange position where I had just nothing.

7:47I remember that very clearly as a time where I would spend my evenings putting leaflets through doors of my local neighbourhood, you know, telling people that they could come and drop stuff off. I spent my days, you know, with friends walking around charity shots, pitching to them and saying that if you've got anything you're throwing in the bin, then redirect it to me I'll come and connect on a Saturday as well as the social media side too but yes it was very much a case of knocking on doors but there was a turning point with that I'll be honest it was probably during COVID people were looking for feel good and connection and warm and fuzzy and that led a lot of people naturally to our doorstep and I think that was also a time where we really started to see i'm going to use the word avalanche of donations and instead of me knocking on doors you know the post for knocking on my door several times a day all right so word starts to spread through this uh local marketing handing out leaflets and and just knocking on doors at the existing charities look look if you're going to toss it give it to me at set or i'll come by and pick it up as you start to collect some initial inventory what happens after that?

9:06A big moment of validation was sometimes you could see the amount that people were paying in terms of postage to send. You know, sometimes or before we could accept donations internally, for example, within the US, someone would readily send a box containing one or two stuffed animals that cost them$150,$200 to send to us just because they cared so much about what happened to it next. So I guess it really gave me a kind of strength of validation in that period. Quite quickly, we started to work our way up Google. So if you type in, you know, donate soft toys or donate teddy bears, for example, we are the first result on the first page, you know, of most of those search terms.

9:51And we have been for a long time. And I think we worked hard on that. And it was our kind of first introduction to SEO and starting to understand that. Okay. Okay. But yeah, there, you know, there was a particular day where I remember opening the door and physically not being able to walk out of my front door because of this wall of boxes. And that was really particularly difficult because we shared a hallway with our neighbor who I hope isn't listening to this because I'm sure he absolutely hates me, but yeah, he could also not get out of his door and it became a bit of a regular thing. and it was kind of funny, but also not so funny.

10:31So now you've got a wall of stuffed animals that have showed up on your doorstep. How do you even begin the process of cleaning these up and crafting a story around each one of these? I solved the first problem. I got some inventory for free. Great. Now I got to go and sell it. Yes. The reality of this business is from day one, it's been a big old journey of trial and error. This isn't a business where you order something from China and then you see if it works and you order it a thousand more times each product needs to be very individually processed and loved back to life in a lot of scenarios and it's been a case of working out how you do that to one and then how you do that to 10 and then how sure you know over the same duration you do it to 100 and then a thousand it was quite literally opening boxes understanding all the sizes and shapes and you know conditions that those toys came in and practicing yeah loving them back to life and you know failing at that a hundred times before making any success with it is it as simple as throwing it in the laundry machine i wish i love the branding on love before where you call it like the spa day where and you show the little teddy bear getting like scrubbed and like a lovingly you know it's got a little bathrobe on i think in one of the pictures it's just like that's great yeah this is something that is a bit of a weird tension with a business like this where you know they do go through the spa and we do like live a lot of that branding and value but you know there is that business side of like if you're trying to scale you can't give each of them a bubble bath with cucumber over their eyes so we've had to very much work out what that balance is and how it's so far from just being able to throw them in a machine.

12:23But at the same time, you have to find cleaning methods that are robust enough that you don't know where these toys have come from. And you have to assume the worst with every single one that you pick up. This is one of the areas where I think I'm often most guarded because it is a bit of a secret sauce and we've worked so hard on it. You've got me curious on like, well, what other categories. Like if I roll up to the local thrift shops and donation shops, like, well, is there a different category of goods where they're like, yeah, we just can't take this or it's more trouble than it's worth for us.

12:52But if you want it, sure, you know, take it off our hands. I'm wondering if there's any other categories because it's so creative. I was going to ask, is there a first sale moment where you're like, okay, I managed to flip one of these or I managed to sell one of these? Was it through social? Was it through the website? Like, take me back to the the first revenue here. Yeah, I actually don't remember the first online sale, but I do remember there was one particular sale and I think it was just so powerful in how much it went for. It was an event, there's like this kind of festival and I set up a stall there and it was cash only.

13:32And a few of the toys I had there were just normal ones. You had, you know, builder bears and stuff like that. It was going for, you know, 10 to 20 pounds, that kind of thing. And there was a couple of really, really special bears I'd had there. And this was at a point, I feel like now I have a built-in valuation tool in my brain, but this is at a point where I certainly didn't. And so I'd had some help in valuing these toys. And there was one there that was valued for somewhere between 350 and 400 pounds. And I thought it was beautiful and really, really special but i certainly didn't you know expect that anyone else would especially for that price tag and it was the first one to go yeah and just in context to translate into dollars we're talking like 450 to 500 for a stuffed bear yeah so it would be over 500 and yeah someone whipped out their purse or there was a wallet actually and took out all of that cash and handed it over And I think I was in such disbelief.

14:33You know, this wasn't a collector's fair. This wasn't that kind of audience. But this person had been so deeply struck by the concept and was so in love with this object and the item and the story it came with that they were more than happy to part with that cash. And so, yeah, that was a really special moment in just, again, making me realize, okay, this has legs and other people get it and other people believe in it. Yeah, there's something to it where something this was going to get tossed, this was going to get thrown away. And now all of a sudden, with the right branding and positioning and story behind it, it's worth 400 pounds.

15:07More with Charlotte in just a moment, including how she landed partnerships with brick and mortar luxury retailers and the surprising operational challenges of scaling this kind of one of a kind inventory business right after this. a lot of side hustlers suffer from what if itis what if it doesn't work what if i don't have the skills what if i pick the wrong path but one thing 100 of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot they phased down those what ifs and they got their answers through taking action our partner shopify helps turn what ifs into why nots shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world from household names to the very guests on this show?

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17:49Is that the early days of the sales side? I would say so. I think putting together a website and working out how to do that was one thing that I was trying to do from the start, but involved a lot of kind of complexity. Obviously, each product needs to be individually photographed and things like that. So going to the odd event felt like an easy touch way to start making sales and start circulating the brand. I have distinct memories of totally alone, carting around a little trolley containing 20 bears in this packaging. Actually, I used to hand make, this sounds so strange, I couldn't afford to buy cardboard boxes to put them in or packaging to put them in so I used to buy pieces of card and I'd hand cut out the frame of a box and make the box myself so I used to cart that all around um to little yeah little fairs summer fairs or school fairs even and just stand And I think that as an entrepreneur, when you're starting out, you have to dig so deep.

18:58You know, when no one else believes in you or what you're doing, you see a path among those people, but, you know, people are walking past and you have to dig so deep in those moments to put yourself out there and start to convince other people. There's a reason to believe in what you're standing out with, you know. Yeah, and it's super valuable. get the one-on-one customer interactions, what they like, what they don't like, what resonates. What are the factors that make somebody pull out their wallet and say, yeah, I'll take one? It's funny because people connect with love before and with the products, you know, and the concept on such different levels.

19:33Sometimes it will be that they walk past a toy and that the name or the story is something that resonates with some aspect of their life and that will pull someone in. It could be that the storytelling itself is what's bringing someone or the kind of initial tag that it's something sustainable, it's something circular and when they dig further they really kind of fall in love with that element. I learned very early on that the packaging was such a huge part of that storytelling and in that like value signaling as well. The fact that these toys were sitting there with a little handwritten bio and they had their own little box with a cushion in and, you know, just bringing them to life in that way again really is what sets it apart from a toy that's in a box at a charity shop.

20:22Yeah, they're super cute. And you've given them all individual names and written a quick background bio on them. Yeah. And often that's supplied by the previous owner as well. oh okay that's awesome that's awesome that's yeah i was gonna say if you just plug it into ai and have them come up with all these like you know heartwarming stories like no it's gotta be authentic but it needs it because otherwise it's like okay you're selling a used teddy bear like okay gross you know that's probably the reaction it's like it needs to be like elevated in in the way that you're doing it yeah that's exactly it like these toys that have been loved there's this big, you know, misconception that they're losing their value.

21:01Whereas actually, if you can physically signal, you know, through the packaging and through the storytelling, that they're so much more valuable through the stories they come with. And that totally changes the perceptions. But yeah, often they come, you know, with their story fully written with little anecdotes about them or memory shared with them, etc. Which is always lovely. Yeah, I'm going to give an example. This is a little teddy bear called Tumbles. It says Tumbles isn't sure how her feet got so big, but she's decided to make the most of them. Great for dancing, stomping in puddles, or simply being noticed.

21:33She's looking for a home where clumsy is just another word for adorable, right? 25 pounds. And so I want to ask about how you think about pricing and margins here, where it's like most on the website, I'm seeing mostly like kind of in the 15 to 25, 30 pound range, you know, call it $20 to$40. Is that a typical price per item? Our kind of most popular price points are between like£16 to£25. You know, obviously that differs, for example, if they're in Selfridges or, you know, different retailers that we're with now, it can be different. But I'd say online on our own D2C platform, yeah,£15 to£25-ish is kind of standard.

22:16Okay. How about in the retail shops. I want to talk about how those retail partnerships came to be to set up, it looks like a semi-permanent display at Selfridges, at Bloomingdale's, at some of these higher end stores. It's funny really, because it's still quite surreal that we're actually in those places. When I started this business, I said, you know, the ultimate goal, I can't remember what the question was asked that made me say this, but you know, it was something along the lines of how will you know when you've made it? And I said, if we can get these toys from rubbish, like literal rubbish, to being sold in the world's most luxury stores, then I've made it.

22:59Yeah, it's a big gap. And it's like, well, it happened. That's crazy. It did. It happened. So with Selfridges, what happened is I wrote them an email. I found an email on their website and I followed that email you know being very insistent that they wanted to hear from me and I followed that and followed that until I found a contact and they put me in touch with the right place and then I said you know I didn't waste much time kind of going back and forth in terms of like an email chain I said look let's have a call and let me tell you about me and love before and why I think you're going to want to hear this.

23:41And so they said, yeah, okay. And we jumped on a call and I kind of pitched love before and I told the story and I'd done a lot of researching and understanding their own goals, especially around sustainability and where they were going as a business. And I aligned it quite specifically with all of that. We started with a pop-up and we did a pop-up in their London store over Christmas to kind of prove ourselves, I guess. And when we did that, they offered us a permanent space in their Trafford and their Birmingham stores. And then not long after that, they offered us London. So Selfridges only have four stores in the UK and we're permanent spots in three of them now.

24:23Yeah. So cold outreach, if you don't ask, the answer is always no, but try to find a decision maker on the buyer side or the merchandising side, especially with brick and mortar retail. It's like, we only have a finite amount of floor space and we got to think about how it's going to turn and how it's going to position our brand. It's like, well, we're not known for selling used teddy bears. So how are we going to make sure this is in alignment with what we want to do? But the research, hey, we know you have these sustainability goals. We feel like this is in alignment. And here, we're not asking for a permanent placement right out of the gate, but let us test it out with a little pop-up over the holidays.

24:58We'll see how the shoppers react. totally let us prove what we can do and i think another big selling point was the fact that we i've done all the design from day one of anything of all the packaging the space design anything kind of creative we weren't asking anything of them we were saying we'll do the storytelling we'll design the space we know how to do this we we know what your variables and how we can fit in with that so i think coming with that full package made a real difference but from that point i'll be really honest as we do some outreach and you know we track leads and stuff our time at our side but actually people look on our doors now you know bloomingdales came to us oh that's interesting i was going to ask if it was similar like a cold outreach to bloomingdales but they found you yes and i would be silly not to think that selfridges are an incredible sales opportunity for us and the traffic and the footfall that they have is incredible and the sales are absolutely great but more than anything else they are marketing and you know many of the buyers or the people that of the other stores we're now stocked in found us because they walked through Selfridges just on a shopping trip or with their child and they were pulled into our space and they started reading about it and they went from there so i think we owe a lot to that kind of first win yeah it's like leveraging some uh some social proof very much so we've had a friend of my harry was running the vertical farming podcast he's trying to get guests like ceos of vertical farming companies and he's like in my first email it's like hey i'm reaching out to you know well-known name number one well-known name number two and so on and then as soon as he booked them he'd replaced that language with hey i've already booked calls with well-known name number one And it's like, okay, how do we keep this virtuous circle spinning?

26:51That's exactly it. You need one foot in somewhere and the rest will follow. Very good. As a percentage of the pie chart, like these retail placements versus online sales versus social versus pop-ups, how does the revenue part break down now? It can vary massively. And I think we're in a moment of real growth on the retail side where we're bringing in lots and lots of new retailers. But it generally tends to be quite 50-50. So from our own kind of D to C side versus the through retailer. And I think that it kind of always has been because as we've grown our capabilities to fulfill larger orders for retailers, so have we scaled our capability to put more on our online drops.

27:37And therefore, they've kind of grown quite nicely in parallel together. Is that how you structure where it's like, we're going to batch spa treatment, a bunch of new donations and then do a drop versus like, we'll put them up Wednesday, Tuesdays as we photograph them, as we get them available. Yeah. So we have always done drops. It's kind of always been the mechanism against which we've worked. At the start, those drops were of 10 to 15 bears, and now it's 150 plus weekly. In terms of our processes, it makes sense, but also actually driving the the exclusivity and the limited availability is a really powerful tool i think on e-commerce particularly well plus there's built-in scarcity was like there's only one tumbles and it's like if you want it he's gonna be gone and it's very competitive like we we have some real you know like genuinely very upset people sometimes at drop time you know people will sit on the website as it leads up to 8 p.m and they'll be waiting and if they miss out on someone they've had their eye on, you know, through our previews or whatever, that causes genuine upset.

28:43It sounds like I'm laughing. I'm not. I find it really upsetting. But that's a really powerful thing. And it's to drive that traffic that you know is going to be there each week. And to be able to track that data and watch it grow and change and fluctuate, you know, throughout the year and the seasons is also really powerful. And those the anticipation is primarily built through the social channels or through email or like, how are you getting people pumped up for the next drop? Yeah, so it's largely socials and we do in the kind of 24 hours-ish leading up to the drop, we will start to preview them.

29:16We put things on our stories, we do posts, we introduce a couple of the stories. We use the kind of Instagram little forecasting family there is to give teasers. we certainly do have i think about 40 000 subscribers to our email and we certainly remind them of the drop and give them a bit of a teaser in that too so i would say it's predominantly socials was there a specific revenue target or milestone and maybe getting into these you know retail shops where you feel comfortable saying this could be a full-time thing like i'm going all in on love before well people are actually quite shocked to find out but i actually do still have another job as well.

29:59Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah. So in true side hustle form, I started Love Before on the Sunday and I started an internship at what is now my other job on the Monday. And so they have grown in parallel together and fed into each one from day one. Wow. So yeah, if you ever find yourself saying, well, there's not enough hours in the day, well, look at what Charlotte's doing over here. Yeah, it's been a wild ride when one job has ended, the other has started. I think people find it quite strange, including my own team, which is of about 15 people now, that I work somewhere else. But when you're starting from absolutely nothing, you have no freedom, you have to grow that freedom.

30:40And we've never taken on investment. So I kind of consider myself my own investor. You know, my fiance, he works full time for the business, he manages the team. And people find it quite strange, for sure. But yeah, I think you have to make sacrifices of all kinds as an entrepreneur and investments beyond financial. And for me, it's just been one of them so far. More with Charlotte in just a moment, including growing the team, how she actually has people volunteering to come work for her and some of the tools and tech she uses to manage it all coming up right after this. Are you still overpaying for wireless?