Her $2,000 Bet on Kids’ Party Chairs Grew Into a $295,000 Side Hustle Business
She ran into a problem when planning her son’s first birthday that became the inspiration for a profitable side hustle business.
Tayo Lanlehin was planning her son’s first birthday in April 2022 when she ran into a problem. While finding chairs for the adults was easy, finding kid-sized chairs that matched the theme she was hoping for proved difficult. It was frustrating, but it was also inspiring.
If she couldn’t find the product, she theorized, perhaps others couldn’t as well. That led to her launching a side hustle business that has grown considerably in the ensuing years. Last year, it hit $295,000 in revenue. Not a bad return on the $2,000 initial investment made three years prior.
Lanlehin is the co-founder of Bay Area Kids
Lanlehin is the co-founder of Bay Area Kids Rentals—and says the company has been profitable since early on, thanks to its unique offerings. Among the chairs offered are a rattan bunny chair and an array of pastel metal and wooden chairs, along with several Instagram-ready tables. She started with a limited test of the market, ordering four styles of chairs, 20 of each, from abroad, and storing them in the basement of the home she shares with her husband and co-founder Dolu Lanlehin.
They created an Instagram page and reached out to event planners. Almost immediately, she found people asking for things like tables, which she didn’t yet have. That only strengthened her suspicion she was onto something.
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“I was like, okay, this is really a thing, and so I went and got more tables, some custom styles, and they just kept reaching out,” Lanlehin said on a recent episode of the Side Hustle Nation podcast.
Success didn’t just come from passively waiting
Success didn’t just come from passively waiting for people to reach out to her, though. Lanlehin was aggressive in finding new customers, even reaching out directly to the wife of an NBA player whose daughter’s birthday was coming up. She also actively courted work from party planners.
“I made a list of the different event planners that I could find online, and I just started following them on social media, putting together pictures of our items, sending them a price list like a menu, telling them what we do, all about us, introducing myself,” she said.
Source: www.inc.com
