Believe it or not, this business – an eCommerce mask store – was started at the beginning of 2020, before the Covid pandemic reached the United States and truly became a global situation. They’ve been making over $5,500 in profit each month and the numbers appear to just keep growing.
Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you come to start this business?
Sure! Career wise, I’m currently a healthcare professional at a huge telemedicine company where I handle the verification and operations of the workflow. When I was in college, I was really into the whole making money online niche and I did achieve a moderate amount of success but had to stop it when I graduated. Sometime last year in 2019 I tried to get back to it and decided to do eCommerce and I created 3 stores. One of them being Aerokarbon, which I created January 2020. Being the medical field, I really wanted to explore niches connected to my expertise and I figured masks would be one of them. I’ve learned I work best on products that I love and use, and given that I regularly wear masks anyway I decided to give it a try.
How many masks are you ordering at a time? What is your cost? Are you renting warehouse space for inventory and shipping operations?
We have a good understanding of how fast a product moves now as we’ve become pretty consistent. We order roughly $5,000 worth of inventory every 2 weeks and that translates to about 2,000 masks (colors and type of masks cost varies). We do not rent warehouse space, instead we hired a team for fulfillment and they are fulfilling it from their home.
78% of your traffic is driven through paid search. What’s your Return on Ad Spend?
We use bing ads to drive traffic to our store. Here’s a snapshot:
It sounds like you spend minimal time on this business. How many people do you have helping on the fulfillment side and how many hours are they working? Are there any automations?
The time I spend is heavily on marketing and designing. The amount of time I spend can be as little as 2 hours a week answering questions from my team or as much as I want to put in. We currently have 5 people on the team: 2 people for fulfillment, 1 for supply chain, and 2 people for customer service. On the fulfillment side we pay them $1 per order and the customer service reps work a total of 80 hours per week.Â
Can you list a few opportunities for a potential new owner to continue growing the business?
Get on facebook ads and google ads! Even though there are strict policies in place right now, if you have the means to get on the platform sales will exponentially grow. We’re relying on a single source of traffic and the conversions are already skyrocketing day by day. Consider launching another line of masks and launch email campaigns (10k+ subscribers).
