Yahoo Finance Aussie brother and sister's $5 million idea after giving up on '9-5 corporate rut'
After just one week in a standard 9-5 job, Maddy knew she wanted something bigger and better.
An Aussie brother and sister duo have found a gap in the market for a niche product and are expected to bring in $5 million in sales after just one year in business. Despite living in different cities and running the risk of making every future family event awkward, Maddy and Dylan Jarvis decided to team up and launch a product called Candy Claws.
A few years ago, Maddy started a job at a major Aussie bank and after just a week, she was over it. She told Yahoo Finance that surely this isn't what her future held.
"I just wasn't challenged enough," she said. "I have always wanted to do my own thing and I just couldn't see myself being in the nine-to-five corporate rut for the rest of my life, so I was pretty quick to move out of there."
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After moving to Sydney where she didn't have any friends, Maddy spent all her spare time looking into e-commerce angles that could help her quit her day job.
She had a go at drop-shipping, Amazon FBA, and selling stuff on an Etsy store - all of which allowed her to learn the tricks of selling products to an online audience and bring in a decent chunk of change.
After just seven months at her boring bank job, she had saved up enough money to quit in 2021.
She was running an online jewellery store and had to take pictures of her hands with the different pieces on.
"I got some of these cheap chemist press-on nails for the photos and they just looked awful," she explained to Yahoo Finance.
That was Maddy's lightbulb moment
A gap in the market to capitalise off an industry problem
Maddy said there was a gap in the press-on nail market in Australia and she started to look into what was already available.
"The press-ons that I had tried weren't really up to the standard of a salon-done manicure, but also the other premium press-on brands I didn't really like their designs," she said.
"They all focused on really long designs, whereas we have come in and really focused on short, wearable designs."
Maddy said getting certain manicures or acrylics for many years can leave people's nails very "thin and brittle". As a result, they try to transition to press-ons and that's where the Sydney resident hopes to strike.
"Our nails are 100 per cent soft acrylic and they're made to look like salon-done. We have premium nail glue so the nails will stay on your hands for two to three weeks, which is revolutionary compared to other cheap chemist brands," she said.
"So basically it's just a salon alternative, except also our nails don't damage the natural nails either."
Turning an idea into a booming business
The 25-year-old enlisted her brother for the idea as he has a finance background and was perfect at the numbers side of a business.
"Dylan has always been very analytical, so that's what makes us the perfect match in terms of being business partners," Maddy told Yahoo Finance.
"He handles all of the forecasting, which is also a reason we've been able to grow so quickly because we have his skill set to properly forecast how much stock to order and manage the cash flow properly because that's probably one of the hardest parts of growing so quickly."
After finding the designs they liked and a production facility that would make them, the family duo ordered 100 sets of press-on nails.
They reached out to a few micro-influencers and invested some money into social media ads to get the word out.
"We sold 70 sets in no time using Meta advertising... that's when we knew we were onto something big," Dylan said.
"I knew nothing about e-commerce at first. I spent every night after work learning everything I could about marketing and launching a product. It was gruelling but worth every second."
They made $6,000 in their first month of business.
That grew to $160,000 by the sixth month.
After a year, they had pulled in $1 million in sales.
This year they're projecting to make more than $5 million in sales, which Maddy admits is "pretty crazy" for a business that's only been around for a short time.
Mixing family with business
It's always a tricky scenario when you work with loved ones, but for Maddy and Dylan, it's a match made in heaven.
"It's funny, because as siblings, we argue quite a lot, but we've actually never had an argument about business," she told Yahoo Finance.
"We actually work very well together because we both have very different skill sets. I think also it's nice because obviously he's my family, so there's 100 per cent trust there, which is crucial.
"I know him very well, so I know what he's good at, and he knows what I'm good at, so we trust each other to do our respective roles in the business. So it's actually been pretty good."
Maddy said they have recently found a warehouse that will be able to handle all their distribution needs, which is a godsend because up until then they had been organising and sending out all their orders from her home.
If you have an idea, go for it!
Maddy said a large part of their success was doing several smaller enterprises first.
Trying her hand at Etsy, Shopify and drop-shipping helped her not only understand how to market something online but also the complexities of managing orders and making sure everything arrived to the customer on time.
"Without starting the initial things, I never would have gotten here," she said.
"Just diving into it and starting something straight away and just accepting the fact that you might lose money and it might take you years to actually get anywhere, but if you just keep at it, you will."
She added that she has also made sure to keep communication with customers as open as possible.
"We have been really open to customer feedback from day one," she said.
"I still read and reply to every email we get and we invested very early on to develop our own custom moulds and we are continually reinvesting to improve our product."
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