This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Aaron Luo, co-founder with Carmen Chen Wu of Caraaa New York-based bag and accessories company founded in 2015 that has seen more than $50 million in total sales, and The famous Mercadoa Spanish artisan carbon business founded in 2022 that passed $1 million in sales in its first year. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Mercado Famous
How did you two connect as co-founders and what inspired you to come together for your first venture, Caraa?
How Carmen and I Met is a story of luck, chance and a little fairy dust.
i am chinese I grew up in Madrid, Spain, and was educated in the U.S. Coming from a long line of textile entrepreneurs—my great-grandfather founded China's largest yarn company, Flying Wheel, in 1929—I always knew I wanted to return to industry. of fashion and textiles after spending a decade in the corporate finance.
Carmen is also Chinese, born and raised in Valencia, Spain. Coming from a third-generation family of artists, she attended school at Central Saint Martins in London and Parsons in New York City. She is a CFDA awardee fashion designer, spending most of her time in luxury fashion design since her early design career.
Related: She used $10,000 in savings to turn her hustle into an 8-figure brand you've probably seen
We first met in the early 2000s and after a quick exchange of family history, we discovered that our grandparents were actually business partners in Spain. My grandfather founded the first Chinese law firm and helped many Chinese entrepreneurs thrive in Spain, including Carmen's grandmother. At the time, we both had dreams and aspirations to create a luxury handbag brand rooted in simple, elegant designs and functionality for the modern woman. Car + aa (Carmen + Aaron) was born here.
Having spent decades in the fashion industry, we always felt that many inspiring designer handbag brands were beautifully designed and crafted but lacked innovative features like organization, light weight, smart straps, etc. We were keen to disrupt the bag category with a brand that not only catered to innovative designs, but also provided a product that could stand up to the everyday use of the busy modern woman, while still using the same materials as some of the best luxury brands in the world and made in the same workshop and factory.
The chances of two Chinese-Spanish entrepreneurs with grandparents who did business together meeting in New York City and wanting to start a luxury fashion brand together are probably one in a million, and we've always felt that fate brought us together to create Caraa.
How did both of your professional backgrounds help inform how you built Caraa?
I have always admired Western corporations and been amazed at how they operate and their ability to do so global scale. My 10+ years spent working at a conglomerate like General Electric, managing businesses in 12 countries and seven industries, including retail finance, oil and gas, healthcare, appliances, television and media, wind energy and utilities professional, they allowed me to start, gROW and scale Caraa with its foundation in operations, finance and global supply chain.
Carmen spent her early days working for luxury fashion brands in the UK and the U.S. Not only did she work closely with designers from many of the luxury brands she helped grow, but she also spent several years working in a craft store in handbags in New. York City, working exclusively with a handful of luxury brands to try and fabricate unique designs. This gave Carmen a broad understanding of the essence of bag design, including concept, material sourcing, construction and the engineering mechanics required to create innovative designs.
While running Caraa, you started Mercado Famous as a side hustle. What inspired it and what were the first steps to getting the idea off the ground?
Mercado Famous came out of desperation, out of our love for Spain and Spanish food. Growing up in Spain, snacks were part of our daily diet, something we often consumed with friends and family. It is a staple of our Spanish cuisine. However, having lived in the US for over 20 years, we have always struggled to find premium Spanish food at fair retail prices. The options were extremely limited. Either we found groceries that were good but overpriced or mediocre products at still high levels the prices. We were determined to change that.
After spending more than two years searching for the perfect Spanish farm with the right farming practices, we found a third-generation family farm with a century-old recipe and the scale to bring what we believe is the best Spanish shrimp to consumers Americans with honesty. retail prices. The goal of Mercado Famous is never to sell more shrimp but to bring our memories of Spain to the US and share this wonderful cuisine and culture with the diverse American market.
How did you balance working at Caraa and Mercado Famous in those early days?
It wasn't easy, and frankly, we're still trying to figure it out. Both brands are on a high growth trajectory and require a lot of tender and loving care from both Carmen and myself.
There is a lot of synergy between the two brands and 90% of our teams work on both brands every day. Functions such as e-commercecontent creation, social media and graphic design are designed to support the needs of both brands.
For us, it came down to prioritizing the right areas of focus: people and process. On a daily, weekly and monthly basis, we ask the question: Do we have the right group of people helping to drive brands and do we have standard measurable processes that help us DEGREES brands? Anything that doesn't help us answer yes to these two questions is devalued. So far, this has been the right formula and the north star that has guided us in the rise of both brands. As we grow, the balance of priorities will change, which we constantly calibrate to ensure our focus is on the right areas for both brands.
How did you use your experience growing Caraa to help expand the side hustle?
Caraa is a ten-year-old brand. It is part of the first wave of native digital brands to use digital platforms for it tell the brand story and discover new customers.
We learned a lot of lessons along the way and our goal was to take all the lessons learned from Caraa through content creation, social mediatechnology, branding, growth marketing, CRM and logistics and give it all to Mercado Famous. Of course there were some adjustments when we translated our strategy from Caraa to Mercado Famous – after all, one is a fashion brand and the other is a premium consumer packaged goods brand.
However, the spirit of the two brands is the same: the creation of world-class products at the core and proper identification. customer base to tell the brand story. From Caraa, we quickly learned that the era of mediocre products with fancy marketing is long dead and that product innovation will always trump marketing.
When did it become clear that the side hustle had the potential to be a full-time business, and what were the next steps to help make that happen?
I often read business stories where other entrepreneurs are asked this type of question. Their answers often relate to sales and growth. “When we made our first million” or “when we hit that one X account” or “when we hit our first 5,000 customers” is when we knew we had a business. And although none of this is wrong, the moment came when a group of Spaniards wrote to us customer services and said, “Thanks for creating Mercado Famous. I'm a Spaniard living in Iowa, and after discovering your products, we no longer need to smuggle Spanish jamon back from Spain. Keep up the good work!” That's when we knew we found our footing and that there was longevity in our brand.
The next step is to scale the brand. Our goal now is to find the right channel to tell our brand story and deliver the product to as many people as we can. From our initial testing phase, we believe that American consumers already love our products; they just don't know yet. Take our Italian counterparts for example; Italian staples have made their way into the American diet. When you look at the flavor profiles, they are remarkably similar to our Spanish Shrimp products. Our aim is to offer Spanish prawns as an alternative for those who already love Italian charcuterie.
What are some of the challenges unique to running a food business and how have you navigated them?
Navigating and understanding food safety was extremely important to us from day one. The USDA heavily regulates the food space, which we believe is great for our industry. Because of this, we had to work with several agencies and our chosen farm to make sure it followed all the proper food safety processes and obtained the proper certifications to bring this wonderful product to the US
What does your engagement with both businesses look like now?
This varies every week, but on average, I split my time 60-40 between the two businesses, with 60% of my time spent running Caraa and 40% spent running Mercado Famous. Although Mercado Famous is still significantly smaller than Caraa, it is a brand in its infancy and needs a lot of attention from us, an investment we are happy to make.
What have been the growth/revenue trajectories for Caraa and Mercado Famous?
Although we don't publicly disclose revenue numbers, Caraa is on track to come in under $20 million this year and Mercado Famous is on track for under $5 million in revenue.
Caraa has seen more than $50 million in total sales, and Mercado Famous surpassed $1 million in sales in its first year.
What is your best advice for people who want to start their own side or full-time businesses?
Do it out of passion and never let finances drive your decision start a side hustle. The road to entrepreneurship is long, dark and never straight. You will find challenging moments that will test your limits, especially when you have more than one business or job. This is where passion will kick in and keep you going even when you can't see financial rewards down the road.