This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A feature. Alchemy Goods owner Greg Kerr, who was working as a musician when he started selling custom pins in 2015. Today, Alchemy Merch is a full-time business creating custom products for companies including AppleNickelodeon, National Geographic, Nike and more, as well as independent artists looking for ways to monetize their artwork in new ways.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Merch Alchemy. Greg Kerr.
When you started yours side hustleand what inspired it?
I had run a literary-inspired clothing brand, Miles to go, and had started making enamel pins as one of the products we offered in 2015. Some friends started asking me for help making them because of the confusion of production abroad can be. Around that time, my wife and I decided to try for a baby, and the day we found out we were pregnant (Father's Day 2016), I bought a domain for Pin Game Strong. I saw that there was a request for help within the artist community, and at first I thought if we could put up a few hundred dollars for our daughter 529, it would be a win. The original intention was for us to continue using the clothing brand and help people make enamel pins on the side. I quickly realized that there was a huge gap in the market to offer retail quality merchandise. Everything was focused on promotional products, and my background running a brand, I thought it was important to focus on products that people would be proud to bring to market. There was a need to go beyond promotion and into full custom.
What were some of the first steps you took to get yours side hustle from the ground?
I had seen a post on an episode of Adventures in Design podcast about how someone should help people make pins. At that point, I had made tons of pins for myself, but I hadn't thought of offering it as a service. I offered to help anyone interested and got a quick response. Word of mouth spread and I saw that people wanted a safe outlet to make pins. Knowing we had a baby on the way was the catalyst for it buy a domain and combine several prizes. I was familiar with how promotional product companies price their products and decided to try to beat them. Once the site was up, things started happening quickly and within days, I had an order for 1000 enamel pins from someone I had no relation to.
Image credit: Merch Alchemy
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while building your side hustle and how did you navigate them?
As things began to move quickly, I was struggling with my time and how to balance it with the brand that had been paying my family's bills for the past few years. We went from 0 to $1 million in sales in 18 months, and it was just me. I did it all: managing the business, handling all the orders, communicating with the factories and all the art. It was too much to handle. We didn't spend a cent on advertising in the first two years. Word of mouth it was spreading and kept me as busy as I could. My first step was to get help handling the art files so I could continue working customer interactions. I wish I had asked for help sooner, but when I finally did get help, it freed me up to focus more on sales.
How long did it take you to see consistent monthly income? How much did the side hustle earn?
Within six months, we had surpassed the monthly revenue of the brand I'd worked with eight years earlier—and it kept growing. Once we saw how fast it was moving, the secondary goal became to replace my wife's income until she had to decide whether or not to go back to work after our daughter was born. We achieved that goal and kept going up.
Since then, you've turned your side hustle into a full-time business, Alchemy Merch. What has been the key to this growth and what does the revenue look like now?
We reached a point where I had to give up the previous business so that I could focus all my time on making products for others. We started as Pin Game Strong and kept adding new products in: patches, acrylic keys, washi tape, etc., and the name just felt too limited. We had built strong name recognition, but knew it was time to grow beyond pins. gROWTH has been challenging over the past few years. When Covid hit, we crashed twice. First, we had delays in getting factories back up and running which caused a lot of refunds for lined up events. Then, in March, they came back and the US was hit with blockades. Most of our business is event driven. Artists sell at fairs, cons, and other events, and corporations will (make items) for conferences or team events. PRECovid, we were just standing, and since then, we've worked hard to really focus on tightening up what we do and how we do it to help differentiate. Although we've had growth over the past two years, it's only this year that we're seeing the energy in people again to create again. We've been hovering under $2 million a year in sales for the past two years, and we're hoping to finally break through that and continue to grow.
What do you enjoy most about running this business?
I love helping people create. Making not only products, but also retail-ready goods can have many obstacles for creators, and our goal is to remove them and help navigate them. Working with other creative people all day is constantly inspiring. Our goal as a team is to collaborate and elevate a client's project.
As you consider the future of the business, what are you most excited about?
I'm excited about expanding the types of products we offer and continuing to help creators. There isn't much direct competition in our field and our size, so the chances of anyone looking to buy us out are low. I hope to keep building a company that continues to provide for my family and our employees and continues to help people.
Image credit: Merch Alchemy
What is your advice to others hoping to start their own successful businesses?
Although I wasn't actively thinking about it at the time, Alchemy Merch is a marriage of all my skill sets and hits on what I really want to spend my time doing. It's hard to run a business after hours if you have one 9-5, but if you really want it, you have to work. If you're thinking about starting a side hustle, really think about what you want to do and whether there's a need for it or room in the market to improve on what's there. The market told me how much Merch Alchemy was needed, and I responded. When it became clear that this had legs, I never looked back. have been self employed for the last 20 years, so it gave me some clarity to ride the momentum and understand what we were doing had real value.
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