Bella Lin was a high school student with five pet guinea pigs she loved. But at 13, she could already pick out all the shortcomings of products available on the market for her beloved pets. Cages were small, difficult to clean, and often hard to see through because of all the wiring.
She wanted to customize her own product and thought it could be a good business idea. So, she consulted with her father, who had experience with e-commerce businesses, specifically running a photo printing services lab.
“Initially, I approached him and he didn’t say much about it other than he thought it was a good idea because my parents were always complaining about the ugly cages,” Lin said. “They were stinky inside the house. They made me put them in the backyard. So he actually really liked the idea when I showed it to him.”
Her father connected her with a manufacturer in China he had worked with. In those early days, Lin would draw paper sketches of possible cage designs and send the images to the manufacturer in China. Lin told Business Insider that she called the manufacturing team in China three to four times a week to communicate updates and adjustments to the product.
The fourth and final design took about a year and three prototypes with a few functionality issues to get. Those prototypes cost $2,000, which Lin said she paid using cash she saved from Lunar New Year gifts.
The final stretch to get her product to consumers was ordering her first 100 units at $1,500, an expense she said her father picked up. They were then directly shipped from the factory to Amazon, going live in November 2022. That’s how GuineaLoft, a company that provides cages and feeders for small pets such as guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, and birds, was born.
Growing a company
When Lin set up her Amazon storefront, she had low expectations and no idea whether people would want to buy her cages.
At the time, she set her price at about $60. Competitor cages were listed between $30 and over $150 on Amazon. Her product listing was very visual. It included high-quality images with detailed listing specifications and a video created by the factory that demonstrated the product’s amenities.
Within two weeks, the 100 units sold out. Her next order was for 300 units, using profits from her first sale to make the purchase. As sales began to come in, she gradually increased the price of a cage to about $75. But while business was good and demand kept flowing, it took a few batches to see any type of profit margin, she said.
“I had to keep putting money into it,” Lin said. “I think until we hit that thousand-unit order, then we were kind of covering the cost of just making it, but that also wasn’t labor costs. I wasn’t paying the team yet. So, they were also kind of taking losses to make it happen.”
Profits for growth
To date, Lin’s sales on Amazon since 2022 are at $688,000 according to records of her Amazon account viewed by Business Insider.
Despite those astronomical sales, Lin says she’s still breaking even. She’s now able to pay her team in China, but she’s not yet paying herself a salary. But not because the money isn’t there. Instead, she’s choosing to reinvest profits to add products and cut down on production costs.
Cutting down costs means cutting out middlemen where possible and keeping all the aspects of her products’ assembly within one factory. For example, the factory did not have an acrylic cutter to shape certain pieces. In the past, large pieces of the material had to be purchased and then cut by a third-party provider. In January 2024, Lin made a $10,000 investment to purchase an acrylic cutter, allowing this process to be completed within the factory, she said. By March, she purchased three more cutters, two of which were larger and quicker. These cutters lowered the manufacturing cost for a single guinea pig cage from $15 to about $8 to $9, she said.
Since Lin doesn’t need a salary from the business right now, she plans to continually spend to grow her brand until it can be sold at major suppliers such as Petco and PetSmart, she said.
Lessons from the journey
Building GuineaLoft wasn’t Lin’s first experience with e-commerce. In 2019, she also started a website with her dad selling athletic leggings that were a cheaper dupe of Lululemon called TLeggings. While she was able to grow sales, there was too much competition from major brands to become profitable.
Pursuing TLeggings took her away from building the GuineaLoft for almost a year in 2019 while she was testing cage prototypes. She realized that not everything is a good business idea.
“It just didn’t feel like it was something that was worth pursuing anymore,” Lin said of her leggings business. ” And then, on the other hand, I had GuineaLoft. This is something that, to me, was pure innovation. I changed every aspect of the traditional cage.”
Her advice to anyone who wants to start a side hustle or a business is to begin with a problem you’re passionate about solving. Research the market well so that you can address a gap in the market.
While GuineaLoft is technically a side hustle for Lin, she never really treated it that way. Running it successfully means splitting her time between high school and the business equally.
The phase of building the prototype didn’t take consistent time out of her schedule. But now that it’s up and running, she needs to put in about 20 to 25 hours a week. Most of that time is spent on calls overseas with her manufacturing team from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. or late at night at 11 p.m. to account for the time difference. On weekends, she allocates about four or five hours.
Source: A 17-year-old high schooler began a side hustle on Amazon with $3,500 and scaled it to
