College dropout started side hustle with $8,000—now it brings in $53,000/month: I want to

Alexandra Rutkay was on a movie set when her side hustle went viral in June.

Rutkay, a full-time makeup artist, was working a 16-hour day on the set of “A Complete Unknown,” an upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, when her phone started buzzing. She clocked out that night and saw that she’d struck a social media jackpot.

After two years of inconsistent sales at her New York-based side hustle Citymouse, which makes fashion-forward mini-diaper bags, two glowing reviews of her bags simultaneously gained views on TikTok and Instagram. Within three days, Citymouse sold out its inventory of more than 500 bags, bringing in roughly $53,000 in sales, says Rutkay, 41.

She promptly bought another 1,000 bags from her China-based manufacturer, and the orders kept coming. Citymouse has brought in more than $635,000 in sales so far this year — $53,000 per month, on average — primarily from its Shopify website, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

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Rutkay, her husband — who recently left his job to work at Citymouse full-time — and a part-time assistant are the company’s only employees, and the couple will pay themselves a combined $150,000 from the side hustle this year, she estimates. Rutkay also works up to 40 hours per week on Citymouse, which remains a side hustle because she still devotes more time to her makeup artist job.

She’s had side hustles since dropping out of college and moving to New York in 2004 to pursue a makeup career, she says. But turbulence in her life upped her sense of urgency: Between February 2020 and February 2021, Rutkay gave birth to her son, her grandmother died and she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in her right thigh.

She’s now cancer-free, she says. Still, the thought of her son growing up without a mother motivated her to change her financial goals. No longer satisfied by a decent paycheck, she wanted to build generational wealth she could pass down — and entrepreneurship was her first thought.

“It was a fear that chilled me to the pit of my stomach,” Rutkay says. “Not to be morbid, but if I had died before [my son] even got to know me, what would I have left him?”

From $5,000 in credit card debt to profitability

The specific idea for Citymouse was born from personal frustration. As Rutkay readied herself to leave for dinner with her son and husband in Manhattan one night, she realized that her beloved Saint Laurent crossbody bag was too small for her son’s snacks, wipes and emergency pull-up.

Her diaper bag, meanwhile, was big and clunky — not ideal for a dinner date.

Walking home, she decided to design a smaller, more fashionable diaper bag specifically designed to fit a toddler’s necessities. She found a manufacturer through Alibaba, an online marketplace, and paid $8,000 — drawing $3,000 from her checking account and putting $5,000 on a credit card — to order samples.

It took Rutkay more than six months to sell her first 500 crossbody bags, made from shiny regenerated nylon. Sales slowly ticked upward as she added interchangeable straps, and hot pink bags ahead of the “Barbie” movie’s premiere last summer.

Then came her lucky viral day. Since then, Rutkay has tried to maintain Citymouse’s momentum on social media, spending $25,000 on Facebook ads so far this year, she says.

The brand now has roughly 32,600 followers on TikTok and 16,000 on Instagram, and roughly 90% of her business comes from social media referrals, she estimates.

This year’s volume of sales pushed the business into profitability, Rutkay adds.

Working toward generational wealth

Citymouse sells crossbody bags for $78.99 each and mini backpacks for $179.99 each. Rutkay hopes that end-of-year holiday sales could push Citymouse’s annual sales past $1 million this year.

Even achieving that goal wouldn’t push the company past many of its competitors — the global diaper bag market is worth an estimated $747.1 million, according to Grand View Research. Rutkay isn’t particularly focused on climbing to the top of the industry, though, she says.

Instead, her goals are personal: She wants to grow Citymouse enough to pay herself and her husband a combined $600,000 per year, or sell the company for at least $10 million and start a new business from scratch, she says.

Quadrupling Citymouse’s profits is a tall task for any small business, one that could take years of those 90-hour workweeks to come to fruition. But $600,000 per year is what Rutkay would need to quit her makeup career.

At that point, “I [could] literally be sleeping and making money,” says Rutkay.

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