Proving your teacher wrong and turning a €50 project into an international business

Inspiration for Wonky Woolins came from toys Chloe Gardiner’s grandma crocheted. The teddies survived every childhood charity clear out in spite of being “extremely wonky”.

“Granny had about six very wonky toys that she passed to my family. Those toys stayed because there was just something special about them.”

Woolins started as a transition-year project when Chloe was 15. Business was her last-choice subject – and her teacher even advised her against the idea.

Turning people’s doubt into inspiration

Chloe was told she had to work with other students, most of whom wanted to sell sweets:

“So, me being me I was like, ‘oh, of course. Yeah, I understand.’ And then I went home and I began to build the business.

"I put a business plan together, made the first prototypes and that's how Wonky Woolins was born.”

It wasn’t the last time Chloe had to prove people wrong. She recalls meeting a local agency at 16 years old and being “laughed out of the place”:

“This kept happening with mentors and people I’d meet. They would look at the business and be so excited and then they'd say to me, what's your background? I'd say I either just graduated or still in school, and it was like they just flicked a switch.

Asked what she would say to other young entrepreneurs, Chloe stresses the need to be persistent.

“If you're a young entrepreneur and you're getting the ‘you're too young’ response, just ignore them and keep going.”

She adds that she’s since found an amazing mentor who doesn’t see age as a barrier.

Building the business through markets

Wonky Woolins launched at a school fair and sold out, says Chloe:

“I was the only person whose stand was just bare by the end of it.”

Chloe says markets helped her learn how to sell Woolins story quickly, giving her a foundation for her approach to marketing. But it wasn’t always easy:

“They were in really rural areas and it was always pouring rain, so nobody would come. It is the most depressing thing. That was early character building.”

Starting to outsource

Wonky Woolins is a premium product, retailing for as much as €60 and positioned as “Heirloom Quality Gifts”.

It takes anywhere from 40 minutes to three hours to make one product by hand and Chloe says that led to some long days:

“I'd leave college at three or four in the evening and go ‘right? Well, I might make it to bed by half five tomorrow morning’ because it was just constant work.”

Chloe’s goal was to find an ethical way to produce the toys by hand. She tried doing that in Ireland, but it was difficult to get to the scale needed, although they still do the quality checking and some of the finishing locally.

She began reaching out to not-for-profits and social enterprises all over the world, and eventually settled on several that Woolins still uses today.

“We've impacted over 150 women all over the world who make our toys. Some are in really terrible situations, they're marginalised or can't get access to work, and we're able to provide them with fair wages and a safe place to work.”

Chloe says that everything you think could go wrong with setting up an international supply chain has done. Training was a big factor and she’s worked on instructional videos that are “painfully detail oriented”.

Promoting the business

Woolins was started with a €50 budget. Even as it’s grown, Chloe’s focused on PR, rather than advertising, as a cost effective way to promote the business.

Enterprise Nation Lunch and Learns were a source of inspiration, particularly when it came to getting PR, she says:

“I don't know how to use any kind of ads or marketing, but what I learned from Enterprise Nation and one of the very small modules we did in school was that the press can really, really help you grow a brand.”

Woolins has been featured in The Irish Times, Irish Daily Mail, on national broadcaster RTÉ, and more. Her approach to finding PR opportunities includes:

• looking at journo requests on Twitter every Friday

• going through the papers online

• compiling lists of contacts from LinkedIn and other sources to email

Looking to the future

The business has been running for six years and Chloe’s now 22 years old. She plans to continue building her team in Ireland:

"We'd love to create a children's series out of it and that's in the works. I want to grow our impact and reach.

"I want to become something that is more well known and, you know, maybe not world domination, but close enough."

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