My name is Gingie, I’m the creative director of Saint Chic,
my product went viral in 2014,
and it almost killed my business.
This is My Work Through Failure Story.
It all started when I launched Saint Chic,
and my Paparazzi Visor went viral in 2014.
What’s a Paparazzi Visor?
It’s a sun visor that my family and I used to use when we played tennis.
It’s 99% U.V. protective with 50 plus U.P.F.
and so it’s great for the beach, great for the pool, great for you know cosmetic surgery procedures and stuff like that.
But people wear it to be noticed, to be honest.
I think the sun protection comes second.
This crazy scandal happened with these 2 big wigs in L.A.
and one of the girls in the scandal ended up wearing the visor to hide from the paparazzi.
It was definitely the best day of my life.
The day that the scandal went down and the Paparazzi Visor went viral, I literally woke up
to the chime of the cash register going off on my phone,
like dozens of times per minute.
And I was like, “What is that sound?”
And then I like looked down at my phone and it’s people ordering stuff from my site.
The visor, I was like taken aback,
because I realized that I finally had something that a lot of people wanted.
Magazines called, stores called.
Everyone called, everyone come, everyone bought, everyone saw.
And it’s the most amazing feeling in the world.
So I get to the office, magazines are calling, CNN’s calling.
FOX 5 wants to come and interview me, and I’m like, “What’s going on?”.
My intern comes to the door of my office
like in a rush, she’s like,
“What just happened?”
And I was like, “I don’t know?”.
The sales definitely kept going.
I mean people were buying multiples, they were buying different colours.
The biggest problem that I had was fulfilling orders.
All of a sudden winter hit,
and people don’t really buy visors in the winter.
In the beginning, hundreds of orders every day.
And later a dozen orders a week.
I mean you can’t pay your bills like that.
You can’t do anything like that.
So by this time I had given up
all my consulting clients,
I stopped designing other clothes.
I was just focusing on the visor. I was on a high.
A visor high.
And shockingly, suddenly just as quickly as it went up it came back down.
I was devastated.
I, I don’t know, I was shameful.
I paraded around, I
flaunted. I flaunted my success, I flaunted
the product.
Well after the sales slumped, I cried, I drank,
I went shopping.
Financially,
I had to go back to you know asking my family for help.
You know considering looking for a job.
Trying to figure out how to pay my bills again.
It was horrible. It was you know back to starving artist status.
I just couldn’t let this get the best of me, like I just felt like all the hard work that I’d done in my
career, like this thing, this was it.
And not that I couldn’t create something else later, but I had to make this work. I had to keep this going.
The Paparazzi Visor is a fan favourite.
If you go to my instagram page or the brand instagram page, which is Saint Chic
you’ll see all the photographs of people wearing visors.
That is user generated content.
I looked at the pictures and I looked at my fans, and I looked at how happy they are.
And then I looked around them
and what else is in the shot.
You got a pool floaty,
you have some sunglasses, you have a beach towel,
and I was like, “Oh my gosh, duh.”
I need to sell other things that go along with the visor.
The first go to was to try and find
places that were hot in our winter.
So I was like on the phone, now I’m calling people. They’re not calling me as much, I’m calling them,
trying to get the visors into different stores, different venues, different shows, different influencers.
I really figured out how to fill in those holes of
you know what people are buying year round.
What my customers like.
Things are
steadily
getting better and better and better and better.
My number 1 advice that I would give would be
so many components that evolve during the lifespan of an entrepreneur
that you really have to be able to roll with it.
You have to be onboard, you have to have an open mind,
and you have to keep learning.
Hi I'm Alex and I have a confession to make.
I have failed many many times.
And so have you.
And that is why I produced this WTF story. So that you and I can feel a little bit less alone.
So if you want to learn more about founders who have overcome their challenges and worked through their failures
be sure to like this video,
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