How I Built This with Guy Raz - Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones

Episode Date: July 17, 2017

Cotton muslin baby blankets are commonplace in Australia, where Raegan Moya-Jones grew up. But when she started a new life and family in NYC, she couldn't find them anywhere. She was sure Americans would love muslin blankets as much as Australians. So in 2006, she started the baby blanket company Aden + Anais, which now makes more than $100 million in annual revenue. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Sam Boyd created Guided Imports, a middleman business to help entrepreneurs find manufacturing and production solutions ... in China. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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If you want to find out more about how I built this live events, go to nprpresents.org. Okay, here's the show. I had read a lot of literature about women entrepreneurs, and I had learned the statistic that only 2% of all women. women-owned businesses ever break a million dollar revenue. Is that true? Yes, isn't that frightening? That's shocking, yeah. But I'd set myself that goal.

So I just said, right, once I get to a million in revenue, I've done something that most women entrepreneurs aren't able to do. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how one Australian mother searched for the right blankie for her newborn. And when she couldn't find it, she built a baby blanket company now making $100 million a year. So back in 2013, you might remember the birth of a brand new royal baby, the heir to the British throne. The Duchess of Cambridge has been delivered of a son.

8 pounds, 6 ounces to the Duke and Dutch. We're looking at these pictures from Buckingham Palace. The day after he was born, mom and dad stood outside St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington and introduced Prince George to the world. He's got a good pair of lungs on, that's for sure. He's a big boy, it's quite heavy. But we're still working on a name.

And as the camera zoomed in on baby George, you could just make out that he was wrapped up in a white cotton swaddle, printed with tiny cartoon birds. And after a little internet sleuthing, people track down the maker of that swaddle, Aidan and Anay. It's a baby product company that sells swaddle blankets for about $15 a piece. And of course, the effect was instantaneous. Within four hours, the company's website crashed, and then it crashed again the next day. And for Aiden and Aene's co-founder Reagan, Moia Jones, it was a pretty big shock because the company was barely seven years old.

And over that seven-year period, Aden and A&A had been through a lot of ups and downs, starting with the recession in 2008. And then eventually, a traumatic breakup between Reagan and her business partner that threatened to dissolve the entire company. A company, by the way, with yearly revenue now of over $100 million. So how did she create this company, Aiden and Aenei? Well, the story begins when Reagan and her husband Marcos moved from Sydney, Australia, to New York in 1997 after he got a job. And Reagan at the time, she didn't really have any plans. I came here without a job, without a working visa,

and I thought, you know what, I'll do some volunteer stuff. I'll learn to speak Spanish because my husband's Chilean. And I'll feel my time that way for two years and sort of treat it as just a new and different journey rather than being, you know, 100 miles an hour with my work. work in my studies. And that didn't kind of work out for me because about four months in, my husband initially was working from home because, you know, they were really setting things up from the ground here in New York. And he walked into the living room and I was laying on the

couch at 11 o'clock in my pajamas, you know, and he just said to me, what the hell are you doing? Come on, you've got to get up and shake this off and find something to do. Were you getting depressed because you were bored? I don't know that I was depressed. I just, I didn't know anybody in New York and I just sort of fell into a rut, I think, and I underestimated how much I needed to be the person that, you know, had a very full schedule. So rather than using the downtime productively, I just used the downtime to lay on the couch and watch morning talk shows.

Yeah, that does sound depressing. It was. It was horrible. Eventually, Reagan's visa did come through so she could start working. And within about a year, she landed a job as a sales rep for The Economist magazine. And this sounds obnoxious, but I was really good at it. You know, the wonderful thing with sales is you live and die by the number that you're told to hit. And I was very fortunate that I never didn't hit the numbers. Did you like it? Did you have fun? I did have fun. I did I love it? Was it my passion? Absolutely not. And I was very frustrated that I wasn't really taken seriously in terms of being able to be promoted and everything. I was very much sort of kept in my box of what I had always done, albeit in different areas of the business over 10 years. But that was that was a huge.

frustration to me that it was obvious. I was never really going to go anywhere within the economist. Were you dreaming of leaving and starting your own thing? I wasn't going to leave it for another job. I think I have always been an entrepreneur. I never defined myself as that, but there was always a desire for me to do something on my own. I just never had had an idea. I'd lots of ideas, but none that I felt were worth sort of, you know, diving in the deep end for. But, I mean, at some point, I mean, you got an idea, the idea that would become Aiden and Anna, so what happened? Well, I had my first of my four daughters.

That's what happened. I was pregnant with Anay and I was, you know, getting ready as we all do when we're having our first baby with all the paraphernalia that you think you need. And I went out looking for these muslin blankets that were. extremely common back home in Australia, so common that you could buy them in, you know, supermarkets. It was mind-blowing to me when I went looking for them in the US that they didn't actually exist. You couldn't find them. And I guess just to explain to somebody who doesn't know what a muslin blanket is, it's sort of like a really soft cheesecloth kind of, right?

Yes, it's like a gauze. And not only was it, in my opinion, and still in my opinion, in the only thing you should wrap your baby in because it's lightweight and breathable and big enough to be able to securely swat all the babies. It was the fact that this one blanket did multiple things. So you could use it as a burp cloth. You could use it as a portable crib sheet. You could use it as a nursing cover. You could use it as a stroller cover. You could, you know, you just use it to mop up the messes that are, you know, inevitable when you have newborn babies, that sort of thing. So, and the thing with muslin is the more you wash it, the softer it gets.

So in Australia, this is just normal. Like, all babies were wrapped in these cotton muslin wraps. Yes. So that was, you know, and I just thought every Australian can't have this wrong. And if I introduced this product to American parents, I was just absolutely 100% certain that they would respond to it. same way as us Aussies had. So you presumably took leave after Anna was born and then went back to the economist?

Yes. I had three months off. And did you go back to the economist with this idea churning in your head yet? Yes. And how do you then start to make this a reality? What's the first thing you do? Well, I had no supply chain or operational, you know, experience. or knowledge. I'm a salesperson, you know. So I had to find out how I would even go about making this stuff. And that took a long time. So you had the idea in 2003 when Anay was born

and it took it took to 2006 to actually work out how to make it and get it to market. So did you start this process all by yourself? I had a partner. The one person that my husband knew from Australia, his best friend's ex-girlfriend, Claudia, who ended up marrying an American guy. And that was the first person I met here. And Claudia is Aidan's mom. She was the other co-founder of Aiden and Deney.

Wow. So you guys got together and she agreed. She said, this is crazy that you can't get these in America. Well, she had Aiden about seven or eight months after I had a day. So I had been in Australia and I was coming back from Australia and I would stop and hang out with Claudia and Mark, her husband, in L.A. to break up the trip. And I distinctly remember sitting on Aidan's nursery floor and I just said to her, we need to, we need to do this, Claudia. like, you know, we need to find a way to make this happen. And she actually said, well, why don't we just try and become a distributor

for the company that already makes it out of Australia? Yeah, which seems like a reasonable suggestion. And I said, well, why would you do that? I said, and I want it to be better than what is already available in Australia. And I remember saying, and we can call the company Aidan and Deney after the babies. And that was sort of how it all got started. All right, just like a logistical question, because you kind of had a growing sense of how to maybe start a business. But what about the design side of it?

I mean, did you have, were you going to design the blankets? Were you going to design the patterns and the shapes on them? That's a great question. Because I am not the most artistic person. Actually, you know, my artistic skills don't go beyond stick. people. I really can't draw to save my life. But I am very opinionated and I have a very clear vision of what I like aesthetically from a design perspective. And I am so type A, you know, that I was very much, I want these colors. I want these images. I want it to look like, you know,

and we, Claudia and I hired, you know, outside freelance design people to come up. with our initial designs that launched the first products. So where did you find the manufacturing facility? How did you find somebody who could make these muslin cotton blankets? This is actually an interesting story, guy, because I was standing at the reception desk at the economist, and the mail arrived, and on the top of the mail was a women's wear daily magazine. So I'm flipping through this and then there's a full page advertisement for an Asian textile sourcing trade show that was happening in New York City three days later. So obviously I went to that trade show and I walked the entire trade show of probably 40 vendors and then I got to literally the last vendor before I was about to walk out the door.

and I walked over and I said, I'm trying to find someone that can make this fabric for me. It's called Muslin. He said, I have no idea what this is, but I work for a major manufacturing company in China. Let me take this back and see what they say. And two weeks later, I got an email saying, we can make this for you, and that was it.

So it was literally the last booth. you went to? Absolutely. True story. I was out the door bar one booth and they ended up becoming my manufacturer for 10 years. Unbelievable. So when they sent you the first sample, did they get it right right away? No. Okay. There was a myriad of back and forth in terms of getting the quality to where I wanted it. And I am not a textiles technical person. I have no idea. I understand the basics now, having been in it for so many years, but I couldn't tell them the grade of cotton. I couldn't tell them the warp and weft counts. I couldn't tell them anything. I just basically said, make it like this, but I need it to be softer. And then I worked with the

factories over the years on the way to wash it and what to put in the wash to make it soft. And obviously as a mum, I wouldn't let them use anything that was in any way. You know, they used to use formaldehyde in dyes on baby, but that stuff just blew my mind. So obviously, that was very important to me that there was none of that in any Aden and A products. And it was a long and laborious process with a hell of a lot of failures along the way where we had full containers of product that when they arrived in the US, like the fabric had turned yellow. So, you know, there's so many stories about the trials and tribulations of actually perfecting the fabrication.

Were you still working at the economist at this point? Yes. I stayed working at the economist until May of 2009. Did you tell your colleagues about it? Did they find out? No. Nobody knew. Were you keeping it secret because you just didn't want?

I didn't want anybody looking or questioning me. And again, I go back. to I was a salesperson. I never, ever didn't make my budget. I didn't want to walk out that door and then have people say, well, it's all good and well that she's created this business, but it was at the expense of the economist. Yeah, right. At this point, I guess, 2006, NAA is three. And then did you have another child by that point? I actually had three of my four daughters by that point. Okay, so you were still working full-time at the economist and presumably flying back and forth to L.A. to work with Claudia on this side business. And you

were also raising three kids. I mean, how did you make all of this work? It was really, really hard. But it was a conscious decision that I made. So when I got home from, I used to call the economist my real job. When I got home from the real job, I was, well in mummy mode and I focused on my girls and then when the girls went to bed at 8.30 that's when I would start my day of working on Aiden and Aeney and I would do that until 3.30 every morning. And because it was a conscious decision on my part, I sort of never, I just never really complained about it.

It was what it was. So it's 2006, you have your first, you make your first big order. How many, what was that order like? What do you remember? Well, we both started just putting $15,000 in for our first inventory and that we did the minimum. We had a boy pack, a girl pack, a white pack, and a towel and washcloth. And I just went door to door in L.A. and New York to every baby store, to every, you know, I picked up the phone, I called bye-bye

baby. That was the sales girl coming out in me and actually jumping ahead a bit. A year later, the target buyer called me, called me and said, can you come in? I took in, you know, six skews thinking they might take one or two. How much is a skew? A skew is like one four-pack. So I presented six four packs thinking they might take one boy and one girl. Yeah.

And Target took all six. Wow. And rolled it out into all Target stores from day one. Once you got orders from these big companies, I mean, you had to then make the order with a factory in China and I guess pay the money. How did you fund that? We initially it was, you know, all our. savings. And the money part of it was actually what brought about the demise of Claudia and my partnership. I don't know if you want me to talk about that, but I can because, you know,

the partner thing is always, well, often a story with entrepreneurs, right? Yeah. So Claudia and Mark were very wealthy. Marcos and I, not so much. You know, we were doing fine, but we didn't have, you know, millions of dollars. Yeah. So, Marcos and I kept up for as long as we could, Matt, you know, we'd put in 15,000, then we put in another 30, then we put in another 40, you know that. And we kept up as long as we could until we got to a point where we couldn't keep up anymore. There was no access to capital, you know. We started the business at the beginning of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

So Claudia said, we just need to borrow money off, you know, Mark and, you know, his family, which I absolutely did not want to do. It was the last resort. But it had got to the point, I think we'd borrowed 100,000 off Claudia and Mark, and then we borrowed another 250,000 off Mark's dad, and very long, story short. It was more Mark, I think, that was just not comfortable with the fact that in his mind they were funding the business. And it just got, it just got to the point where, you know, I got a demand of you've got 30 days to come up with this to buy us out. If you can't do that, we have the right to pay you the same. And if we can't come to an agreement, we're going to dissolve it. When we come back in a moment, how Reagan's company and friendship

with Claudia changed forever. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So when Reagan's friend and business partner Claudia told her she wanted out of Aiden and NAA, Reagan had to figure out how to hold on to the company. When Claudia exited the business in 2008, it was, it was me. It was just me alone doing all the work. I was sales, customer service, manufacturing, marketing, finance at my business. My husband was helping with the finance side of things. So I hired one person to at least alleviate some of the work that I was having to start

doing at 8.30, 9 o'clock at night once my girls went to bed because that was also a line I drew very deeply in the sand for myself that these little girls did not sign on for an entrepreneurial mother, but I did believe in the business. and I went out to a few of my other friends who were watching what I was doing to raise the few hundred thousand dollars that Ploria, you know, wanted for, you know, the work that she'd put into the business so far. To buy her out. To buy her out.

So three other people came into the business and bought 49% of the business for like 500,000. $1,000. Wow. This is a really important story because we don't get to hear these stories too often about the reality of starting a business with a partner where at the beginning there's this vision of a kind of a utopian business and there are partnerships that really work. But oftentimes the case is more like this where money gets involved and tension builds and people get nervous about the investment. And you can kind of understand where Claudia and Mark were coming from. I mean, they were getting nervous. They had a lot of money on the line. But, I mean, I have to imagine that it took a toll on your friendship. Oh, well, she never spoke to me again. Because I just responded and said, Claude, what are you doing?

Breaking my heart here, we can talk through this. You know, I was the legal guardian of their children. That's how close we were. And it was horrible. It is horrible. But, you know, it was, I wanted. to talk to her. She just, in her mind, it was over. And look, and I get it. She was under the pressure of her family and it was her marriage and all of those things. So I don't, I don't not understand why it

happened. It was just, it was just heartbreaking that it did. Did you, did you think that the business was going to collapse? No. I never thought that. I, I thought I might collapse. And I questioned whether or not I could keep going because obviously it was an extremely emotional time. But no, I've never, ever doubted Aiden and Deney. Was there any tension in your marriage? I mean, was Marcos fully supportive? He was the one who actually, when I started to get a bit shaky through the whole drama with Claudia,

and I said to him, look, I don't know if I can do this. And he said to me, do you believe in the business? And I said, I absolutely believe in the business. He said, well, then fight for it. You know, don't give up, fight for it. Have you ever had any contact with Claudia since the breakup? Absolutely none. Unfortunately, the friendship was very much a casualty of the business.

But she must know where the company has. has gone. Her child's name is obvious. I know. People ask me why I didn't change the name, and it's why I still refer to myself as the co-founder, even though Claudia's been gone forever. I co-founded this business with her, so it didn't feel right to me to just sort of cut her out of the story. So you buy out Claudia's share?

Well, I don't. Your partners do. And you, and you move. You continue to grow this business, believing that this is going to work. And at what point were you finally able to leave the economist? What was the milestone you hit in the company that made you comfortable that you could focus full time on this thing? Well, I had read a lot of literature about women entrepreneurs. And I had learned the statistic that only 2% of all women-owned businesses ever break a million dollar revenue.

Is that true? Yes, isn't that frightening? That's shocking, yeah. So I set myself that goal. So I just said, right, once I get to a million in revenue, I've done something that most women entrepreneurs aren't able to do. So at that point, I allowed myself to quit and focus on A-N-N-A full-time. All right, so finally, when you leave the economist, I'm assuming you told them why.

No. You didn't? No, I didn't. I just said I've got another opportunity and here's my two weeks notice. And my then boss, who I wasn't a huge fan of, I was having a discussion. And I distinctly remember it was about a week before I was, I handed him my resignation. So I knew it was coming. And I sat in his office and he said to me, oh, what would you know?

You do not have an entrepreneurial bone in your body. And then here's even, this story gets even better. That boss ended up working at cranes. Yeah. And we have won multiple awards with cranes as one of the fastest 50 growing entrepreneurial businesses in New York. I mean, do experiences like that with your boss, do they, like, add fuel to your fire? Are they powerful motivators for you? You know what my biggest motivation always was with this guy and it was never about making a lot of money?

Mine was very much proving to myself I could do it because I had been told by many people over the years that I was only capable of X. When in my heart of hearts, I always thought I was capable of Y, but I was just never afforded the opportunity to prove it. Okay, so by 2009, you leave the economist and then I guess you're profitable. But by the way, what is your revenue that year? We closed 2009 at just over 4 million. So as soon as I focused on it, you know, 100%, it changed the game. And then we more than doubled every year for the five years after that. I guess it was around 2010 where you took on some outside investment.

That's correct. I took on my first private equity firm in 2010. Why did you do that? I mean, up until this point, you are the majority. owner, you know, you're doing well, four million revenue. What did that enable you guys to do? Well, it enabled me to scale. So it gave me some money to be able to hire some more people, buy more inventory, because we would literally be, you know, the core team. There was about eight of us, nine of us. And we would be sitting there late at night going, okay, well, we need, we'd do our

inventory planning. We'd say, okay, well, we need this. And then we'd look at it and go, well, we can only afford half of it and we'd just have to cut half of what we really needed. We could never keep up with the demand. So when the private equity firm came in, it just allowed us to be able to get, look, even today I can't keep up with the demand, but it's, it enabled us to get closer to it at least back then. Yeah. I know that at a certain point, celebrities started to be like, you know, us weekly like that, just like us, they're just like us. They swaddle their babies, the swaddle was like your swaddle blankets. When did you start to see celebrities using the blankets?

One week after we went on the market, when I say went on the market, me walking the product to the stores and handing it to the store owners in L.A. Adam Sandler and his wife, who just had their baby, were photographed on Malibu Beach with their baby in a carrier with an Aiden and A. Blanket draped over the front of the baby, and it was a full-page picture in Us Weekly. So we had celebrity press from a week after we went on the market. Did anybody know what the blanket was, though?

No, not back then, but we actually named a paparazzi once sort of as a nod to how many photographers photograph our blankets with the celebrities trying to hide their babies away. Back in 2013, Prince William and Kate Middleton, I guess we should call them the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, they had a baby, Prince George. They leave the hospital and what did you see? They left the hospital in an Aden and a blanket, which blew my mind having been raised in Australia because that I would have bet every penny I had on the fact that was never going to happen because there's royal protocol

and no royal baby has ever come out in anything other than a white wool blanket that has been royally appointed to the family, you know. And lo and behold, they walk out in, Aiden and A&A and the world goes wild. And so did sales just go crazy? Yes. You know, the typical reaction, the Royal Effect,

our website crashed twice. We sold out of that around the world. People were coveting it to the point where they were paying three times the value. It was insane. I was like, guys, we've got other patterns over here of the same, but they all just wanted what the Royal Baby had. What was the pattern that he had, by the way? It was, interestingly, it was from a pack called Jungle Jam,

which was the third pack that I ever released. So that particular design had been on the market for eight years when the Royal Baby came out in it. I mean, just to be clear, these are not like super crazy expensive, right? I mean, how much is a four pack? Well, now it's $49.95. When I started, it was $44. And that was always, I never set out to build a, a luxurious celebrity, you know, endorsed brand.

I wanted to create and make other mothers aware of this amazing product that as a mother, I just didn't understand how they could have babies without it. When you, around, I guess, around 2013, you guys got a big investment, right? That's correct. Swanda Pace Capital entered in, and they became the majority shareholders now in Aiden A, and A, however, I still remain the single largest individual shareholder in the company. So explain how this works.

They bought a big share of the company, but that allowed you to cash out some of the value of the company? That's correct. They bought the whole company. What I did was bought back in as a major shareholder in the company. I mean, so in a sense, that, I guess that made you sat financially for the rest of your life. Yes, baby blankets have afforded my family an incredibly wonderful life. And you're still the CEO? I am.

So a pretty incredible result. Yes, it is. Although what I will tell you, Guy, is I much prefer and I believe I'm much better at the entrepreneurial building of a company. Now that we're over $100 million, it's just very very. different, you know, obviously the way you run a hundred million dollar company to the way you run a, you know, a 20 or even a 30, 40 million dollar company. You know, you can get by with running your business on Excel spreadsheets at 30 million. It doesn't cut it at 100. Like at 30 million, I was still very much involved, you know, in a lot of the day today. Whereas now at this size,

oh my gosh, there is so much that, you know, I'm only getting. updates once a week. I'm just not involved in that kind of way anymore. So I definitely do not enjoy this as much as I did when I was much more in the weeds of the business. And I, you know, I miss that. Given that you got this big payout, do you ever think, I don't know, maybe I'll just like stop working and just take up a hobby or do something completely different? for a while. Well, it's, I could never be the lady that lunches. It's just not, you remember back to the story of me on the couch in my pyjama, you know, so too much time is not a good thing for me. Interestingly, I was talking to my eldest daughter, Renee, the other night and I said,

what do you think, baby, if, you know, mum stopped being the CEO of Aiden and Annae, and, you know, I could spend more time and she's like, please don't, mum. I come, I'm good, we're good with the amount of time that we have you around. So I laughed hard at that. But not only do I think that it would be good for me that if I maybe wasn't the CEO of this business, it might be good for the business to bring in somebody who has run a business of this size and has scaled from 100 to 300 because I really believe that that's where this brand is going. And do I think I could do it? I know I could do it, but I would do it making a hell of a lot more mistakes than somebody who is seasoned who had done it before. I'm a self-taught CEO. I've never run a $100 million

business before till this year when we're $100 million, you know. So there are people out there, though, who have done that for many, many years and have a proven track record that, you know, that would probably do a much better job of it than I do. And selfishly being the mum of four little girls, my worst nightmare would be in 15 years' time when I am sitting at a bar with my four girls as adult women, not being able to turn to Aiden and Aenea as a company and a brand and say, hey, your mum did that

when you were tiny babies at our kitchen table and now look at it. It's a half a billion dollar global brand. So that's my ultimate goal for how this story is going to play out. Reagan-Moya-Jones, she's the CEO and co-founder of Aidan and Aeney. By the way, a few months ago, the Huffington Post ran a story called 52 Things I Learned in 52 weeks of parenting. And number one on the list was that nobody can pronounce Aiden and A. So you kind of know you've made it as brand when you're number one on a list.

in a Huffington Post, you know, article on motherhood. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And this next story comes to us from Shenzhen, China. My name is Sam Boyd, and I'm the founder of guided imports. And Sam's story jumped out at us because, you know, a lot of times we do interviews with people on the show who invent something and then build a prototype, and then they find a factory in China to make it. And Sam?

he is the guy in China who finds the factory. And all of this started about five years ago when he was in college and studying Chinese in China. And one day at a restaurant, two locals walked up to him. We started talking, you know, they see a foreigner in this small city and they want to know what's going on. What is he doing here? And I asked what they do. And, you know, it sort of led to them talking about their factory and them asking me, do you know anyone who's interested in purchasing our products?

And I said, yeah, sure. I don't really know anyone, but I'm going to find someone for you. Okay, but the product these two guys were talking about pretty specific. They were talking about sterilized packaging, like the kind of thing you might use for medical equipment. And Sam didn't have a clue how to find buyers for something like that. But it didn't really matter because after that conversation in the restaurant, he saw an opportunity. China is incredible in terms of it being such an entrepreneurial. location and being fortunate enough to have a Western education, having grown up in America,

I said, I can be doing this. And by this, he was thinking, I could be the middleman. I could be the person between people in the West who want to sell consumer goods and Chinese factories that want to make them. So to learn more about how all this worked, Sam got a job at a company in Shenzhen that makes electronic gadgets. And when I saw how things work, And I really just explained it as my, I opened my eyes and saw, you know, this is how business is done.

So that was the experience that I had where I said, why do I have a boss right now? I don't want a boss. I want to be the boss because I can make something big. At the time, Sam was 22 years old. And that day, he quit his job at the gadget company and set out to become an American middleman in China. I was on the other side of the world from friends, from family, from every type of safety net that I've ever had in my life. and the Monday of me going to work and going to work was leaving my bedroom and going to my kitchen table and my shared apartment in Shenzhen. It was just, oh my goodness, what do I do?

So Sam started scrolling through Reddit pages and blogs looking for English-speaking entrepreneurs who wanted their products made in China. And I started just saying, hey, I'm an American. If you're looking for products, let me know, and I can try to help you find them. And in its first year, Sam signed up about 15 clients who, wanted to make stuff in China. Like watch boxes and jewelry boxes, wallets, toothbrush replacement heads. Now at the time, it was just Sam and his assistant. And the two of them would call places all over China to find factories to make the products.

And it's funny because I remember my roommate, he wasn't too happy with all of the boxes that were just coming in and filling up the apartment. And we were stacking boxes of just products that we were getting ready to ship out of product. That was during the first few months. Now, Sam's been in business for three years. He has an office with 15 employees in Shenzhen. And the company helps clients find a factory. They do quality control.

They handle all the shipping. And they do all this for a flat fee, about a thousand bucks. And last year, Sam says guided imports made almost half a million dollars. Once I started building this company, I said, I'm going to stay here for five years. Well, now I look at it and I already said I'm going to stay here five years. I'm overstaying that. So I don't necessarily know what the future is. It could be another five years.

It could be, you know, 50 more years. That's Sam Boyd. He lives in Shenzhen, China. You can read more about his company guided imports on our Facebook page. Just search how I built this on Facebook. And, of course, if you want to tell us your story, please go to build.npr.org. We love, love, love hearing your stories. And thanks for listening to the show this week.

If you want to find out more or if you want to hear previous episode, You can go to How I Built This.NPR.org. You can write us, H-I-B-T at NPR.org. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at How I Built This. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Fockner with original music composed by Rumteen Arablui. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkampur, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Lawrence Wu. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

If you're looking for a new podcast to try, how about Planet Money? Give it a fresh listen. One thing people say about Planet Money is how much they love listening to it, even though they don't care about business or economics. It's just a smart show with great stories that help explain our world. It's explanatory journalism at its best for a time that really needs some sane reporting about the big questions. Find Planet Money on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. I listen to Bullseye because Jesse always has really good questions. What did John Malkovich wear when he was 20? I don't know how to describe it. Bullseye. Interviews with creators you love and creators you need to know. From maximum fun.org and NPR.