- In 2012, I took $1,500
and started a side hustle.
By 2022, I grossed over
a hundred million dollars in revenue.
and this is how I did it.
[energetic music]
I'm Alexandra Cristin,
the owner of Glam
Seamless hair extensions.
We're known for our
clip-ins, our tape-ins,
and our weft hair extensions,
but what we really sell is transformation.
In 2012, I went to a hair salon
and there was someone next to me
getting these brand new
extensions called tape extensions
and I had no idea what they were.
I asked the hairstylist, how
much are those extensions?
And she told me they
were a thousand dollars.
As being a recent college graduate,
there was no way that I could afford them.
So I went home and I
was like, you know what?
Of course we can buy
this online for cheaper.
I go online,
and to my surprise, there were
no tape extensions online.
That is how my company
Glam Seamless was born.
I decided to go and create my own company
for this product that I just thought
was too expensive at the salon.
My first investment was from me,
saved up from my side hustles
and I ended up using 00
for three specific things.
First was to get 0 a
product off of Alibaba.
The second was to start a Shopify store
and the third was to use
a little bit of money
for marketing and graphic design
to put up some web banners
and some social media ads.
When I first started out,
I went through 25 different
vendors on Alibaba.
It was such a tedious process
seeing who had the best quality,
who was reliable,
who was actually gonna
deliver on what they said.
Obviously, today I'm no longer
sourcing off of Alibaba.
I've found really good suppliers.
The bigger my business got,
people started hearing about the brand
and actually suppliers would come to us.
Also, you could find
suppliers at trade shows
and a lot of international suppliers
will come and fly in
from different countries.
I know a lot of international suppliers
really, really appreciate
the face-to-face,
so if you can get to a
wholesale trade show,
this is gonna be one of your best bets
when it comes to finding vendors.
The ROI with the 00 that
I spent on my business,
I started to see that
back within six months.
Pretty quickly, we were doing
a couple thousand dollars
in sales each month,
and what I would do
with all of that revenue
is I kept investing it
back into the business.
I never quit my side hustle.
I was still working as a nanny.
I was still working as a plus size model
for up to two years.
I did everything myself.
I did what they call guerilla marketing,
and this is basically a really
low cost marketing tactic.
I started doing blogs.
These were free.
I've had all the time in
the world to just sit there
and blog about different
types of hair problems.
Now, this blogging really helped me
with something very important called SEO.
This is what you need to
grow an e-commerce store
for basically nothing.
I didn't know it at the time,
but all of that blogging
was helping me gain traffic to my website.
My second big money move was taking out
a high interest loan.
After a year and a half
of running the business,
the sales were just rolling through
and what no one really
tells you about business
is that growth eats cash.
What does that mean?
The more money you're making,
the faster the orders are coming in,
the more money you're going
to need to grow the business,
especially if you're a
product based business.
This loan was for ,000.
It was 18%, which is outrageous.
I took that risk because I knew that
I needed this money to
purchase my inventory.
When I first started my business,
the whole goal for me
was that I could stop
doing these side hustles
and just work on one main thing.
But after two years,
we started doing 20,000, ,000 a month
and I'm like, this is insane.
I'm working from home, I'm
generating ,000 a month,
it's just insane.
It's just me from my
two bedroom apartment,
next I'm like, what else can we do?
My goal was, I wanna hit a
million dollars in revenue.
And so I said, how much
is a million dollars?
A million dollars in revenue is ,000.
I would write this
number down in a notebook
every single day
and then eventually over
the next 12 to 18 months
I started seeing the sales skyrocket.
It went from 30000, 500000, 60,
next you know, within
two and a half years,
we were at a million dollars a year
and this was when I finally
started to scale my business
and finally hire a team.
My next big money move
was I took out a hundred
thousand dollar loan
and I used it for four different things.
One of my favorite lines is
scare money, don't make money.
And it's so true.
When it comes to business
or anything in life, really,
you've gotta pay to play.
So before I decided to take out
the hundred thousand dollar loan
I already had an idea of how
I wanted to use the funds.
I wanted to be very
meticulous, very diligent
of where the money was gonna go
because if I didn't have a plan
before I took out the loan,
I felt like I was just gonna blow it
and that was something I
was not willing to risk.
The first way I used the business loan
was to actually hire a night nurse.
In 2016, I had a baby.
I was running my business from home.
Our revenue was 2.5 million dollars a year
and I was the one running all of this.
I had to make sure that I
was gonna be able to work.
So I used that loan to hire a night nurse.
This gave me the ability
to sleep, to work longer,
and really helped me
propel the business forward
in one of our most crucial times.
Looking back, I felt
like I was either being
a really good business woman,
or a really good mother,
but rarely both at the same time.
As women, we have to not be
afraid to invest in ourselves
so that we can financially protect
and take care of our families.
I grew up really poor
and I watched my mother
work two and three jobs.
My father was never around.
I've seen this woman
just do whatever it took
to make sure that I was good,
that I had opportunities.
For me, when I had this
business and I had my baby
at the same time,
I promised myself that I
would do whatever it took
to make sure that my
business was successful.
I think women, we have
a lot of guilt around,
"Maybe I shouldn't take out a
hundred thousand dollar loan
and risk this for my family,"
or "Maybe I definitely
shouldn't get a night nurse.
I should be the one
there every single night"
and so you grapple with that.
"Where should I invest
my time, my energy."
At the end of the day,
if you can take care of
your child in the future,
for me, that was the reward.
The second way I used the money
was to create a better website.
Of course, it's an e-commerce store
so we had to have the best of the best.
The third way that I used the money
was to do photo shoots and videos.
Of course, when I was
first growing the business
I was using free stock images
and those worked for a while.
But when you start to build a brand,
you've got to have an identity
and unfortunately you're
not gonna find that
on stock images.
That's what we invested in,
really creating the brand.
The imagery, videography, what
is the story we're telling?
What are we really selling here?
And when we did that,
people really started to see
what Glam Seamless was all about.
The fourth thing we invested
in with this business loan
was advertising.
Now, this was very scary.
Again, it had been three years.
We were already making over
a million dollars a year
without any advertising.
We were basically
generating all that revenue
from blogs, SEO,
but it was time for us to scale up,
so we decided to invest
money in advertising
and it really, really,
really helped the business.
We took out the hundred
thousand dollar loan
and within the next year,
we doubled our sales from 2.5
million to 5 million dollars.
My next big money move was taking out
a 0,000 personal loan
from one of my mentors.
The first thing that we
did was get more inventory
and finally move this business
from my two bedroom
apartment into an office.
Then, we decided to take
0,000 and pay a spokesperson.
Now, our budget that year was only ,000
for paid spokespeople,
but we decided this was
a celebrity hair artist
who was hopefully going
to take our business to the next level.
And for us, it was one of
the biggest investments
we've ever made.
I didn't even have any employees
that were making 0,000
a year at this point.
And it was risky because
at the end of the day,
we didn't know how this
was going to perform.
Was he going to help us
get our word out there?
Was he going to create content?
Would the press
and the celebrities
actually use the product.
Luckily, it worked out.
We were able to get a lot of press
and go on many different shows
and actually have
celebrities wear our product.
So now the celebrities are
being tagged in our product
which obviously gave us
social proof and credibility.
So obviously taking a
half a million dollar loan
is such a huge risk
and when it comes to business
you have to take calculated risks.
For me, how I do that is I
envision the worst case scenario.
Now, I grew up poor
so I literally come from nothing.
I know what it's like to
build from the bottom.
For me, I wasn't afraid
of what was gonna happen
because I already knew what
it was like to have nothing.
I've seen my mom take
plenty of risks growing up
and I've seen her work really hard.
For me, it was all about,
what is the worst that
could really happen.
And when you envision the
worst that you can happen,
one, it's gonna motivate
you to work harder
and make sure that doesn't happen,
and two, worst case scenario
that it does happen,
you know exactly what
it is you're up against
and what is there really to be scared of.
All of these money moves
resulted in a business
that was doing more than
10 million dollars in revenue per year
in less than five years
from the day I started the company.
My number one money tip
is to invest in yourself.
You are the best investment
so you should always bet on yourself
and take risks to get you
into the position where you want to be.
Thank you so much for tuning in,
I'm Alexandra Cristin,
the self-made boss babe.
Thank you so much to Glamour and everyone,
let's go get that money.
[upbeat music]
How This Model Turned $1.5K into a $100 Million Hair Extensions Business | Glamour
Категорія: Відео
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Дата: 10.08.2023
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