This Q&A spotlights Side Hustle with Aaron Luo, co-founder with Carmen Chen Wu of the company CaraaNew York-based handbag and accessories company founded in 2015 meaning total sales exceeded $50 million, and The famous Mercadoa Spanish company specializing in artisanal meats founded in 2022, with sales in its first yr exceeding $1 million. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Photo credit: courtesy of Mercado Famous
How did you connect as co-founders and what inspired you to hitch forces on your first enterprise, Caraa?
The meeting of me and Carmen is a story of fate, probability and a little bit of pixie dust.
I’m Chinese. I grew up in Madrid, Spain and was educated in the USA. Coming from a long line of textile entrepreneurs – my great-grandfather founded the largest thread company in China, Flying Wheel, in 1929 – I at all times knew I desired to return to the fashion and textile industry after spending a decade in corporate finance.
Carmen is also Chinese, born and raised in Valencia, Spain. She got here from a family of third-generation artists and attended schools at Central Saint Martins in London and Parsons in New York. She is a CFDA award-winning clothier, and since the starting of her profession as a designer, she has devoted most of her time to designing luxury fashion.
We met in the early 2000s and after a quick exchange of family stories, we learned that our grandparents were actually business partners in Spain. My grandfather founded the first Chinese law firm and helped many Chinese entrepreneurs flourish in Spain, including Grandma Carmen. At that point, we each had dreams and aspirations of making a luxury handbag brand rooted in easy, elegant designs and functionality for the modern woman. This is where Car + aa (Carmen + Aaron) was born.
Having spent many years in the fashion industry, we at all times felt that many inspiring designer handbag brands were beautifully designed and crafted, but lacked modern features similar to organization, light weight, smart straps, etc. We desired to revolutionize the handbag category with a brand that not only cared o modern designs, but also delivered a product that may withstand the on a regular basis use of the busy modern woman, while still using the same materials as some of the world’s best luxury brands and manufactured in the same workshops and factory.
The probability that two Chinese-Spanish entrepreneurs with grandparents who were in business together would meet in New York and want to begin a luxury fashion brand together is probably one in a million, and we at all times felt that fate brought us together to create Caraa.
How has your skilled experience helped you build Caraa?
I have at all times admired Western corporations and am mesmerized by their functioning and their ability to scale globally. Over 10 years at a conglomerate similar to General Electric, managing businesses in 12 countries and seven industries, including retail finance, oil and gas, healthcare, appliances, television and media, wind energy and skilled services, allowed me to begin, grow and scale Caraa based on operations, finance and global supply chain.
Carmen spent her early years working for luxury fashion brands in the UK and USA. Not only did she work closely with the head designers of many of the luxury brands she helped develop, but she also spent several years working at a leading handbag store in New York City, working exclusively with several luxury brands to sample and produce unique designs. This provided Carmen with a broad understanding of the essence of handbag design, including the concept, material sourcing, construction and engineering mechanics required to create modern designs.
While running Caraa, you started Mercado Famous as a side business. What inspired him and what were the first steps to bring this concept to life?
Mercado Famous was created out of desperation, out of our love for Spain and Spanish food. Growing up in Spain, cold cuts were a part of our every day food regimen and we frequently ate with friends and family. This is the basis of our Spanish cuisine. However, having lived in the US for over 20 years, we have at all times had difficulty finding high-quality Spanish meats at fair retail prices. The options were very limited. We either found meats that were good but expensive, or mediocre products at consistently increased prices. We decided to alter that.
After over two years of searching for the perfect Spanish farm with proper agricultural practices, we found a third-generation family farm with a century-old recipe and the scale to supply American consumers at fair prices with what we consider the best Spanish meats. retail prices. The goal of Mercado Famous is never to sell more meats, but to bring our memories from Spain to the United States and share this glorious cuisine and culture with the diverse American market.
How did you initially cope with working on Caraa and Mercado Famous?
It hasn’t been easy and truthfully, we’re still attempting to figure it out. Both brands are on a rapid growth path and require a lot of tender and loving care for each Carmen and me.
There are many synergies between each brands, with 90% of our teams working on each brands every day. Features similar to e-commerce, content creation, social media and graphic design are designed to support the needs of each brands.
In our case, it got here right down to prioritizing the right areas of focus: people and processes. We ask ourselves every day, every week and every month: Do we have the right group of individuals to assist run the brands and do we have standard, measurable processes that help us scale the brands? Anything that does not help us answer “yes” to those two questions loses priority. So far, this has been the right formula and the north star that has guided us through the development of each brands. As we grow, the balance of priorities will change and we are consistently calibrating to make sure we are focused on the right areas for each brands.
How did you utilize your experience growing Caraa to develop a side business?
Caraa is a brand that has been existing for ten years. It is a part of the first wave of digital-native brands that use digital platforms to inform brand stories and discover recent customers.
We learned many lessons along the way and our goal was to take all the lessons learned from Caraa in content creation, social media, technology, branding, growth marketing, CRM and logistics and bring all of them to Mercado Famous. There were actually some adjustments made as we transitioned our strategy from Caraa to Mercado Famous – after all, one is a fashion brand and the other is a premium consumer packaged goods brand.
However, the soul of each brands is the same: at their core, it is about creating world-class products and identifying the right customer base to inform the brand story. We quickly learned from Caraa that the era of mediocre products with fancy marketing is long gone and that product innovation will at all times trump marketing.
When did it turn out to be clear that your side hustle had the potential to turn out to be a full-time business and what were the next steps to make it occur?
I often read business stories where other entrepreneurs are asked a lot of these questions. Their answers are often related to sales and growth. “When we made our first million” or “when we opened one X account” or “when we got our first 5,000 customers”, we knew we had a business. And while neither of them are unsuitable, that moment got here when a group of Spaniards wrote to our customer support department and said, “Thank you for creating Mercado Famous. I’m Spanish living in Iowa and after discovering your products, we no longer need to smuggle Spanish jamon when we return from Spain. Keep up the good work!” That’s when we knew we had found our base and that our brand had longevity.
The next step is to scale the brand. Our goal now is to search out the right channel to inform our brand’s story and reach as many people as possible with the product. We imagine that from the initial testing phase, American consumers already love our products; they just don’t know it yet. Take our Italian counterparts for example; Italian meats have widely penetrated the American food regimen. If you look at the flavor profiles, they are extremely much like our Spanish meat products. Our goal is to supply Spanish meats as an alternative to those that already love Italian meats.
What are the challenges of running a food business and how did you overcome them?
From the very starting, it was extremely vital for us to navigate and understand food safety. The USDA strictly regulates the meat space, which we think is great for our industry. For this reason, we needed to work with several agencies and the farm of our selection to be sure that they followed all the proper food safety processes and obtained the appropriate certifications to bring this glorious product to the USA
What does your cooperation with each businesses appear like now?
This changes weekly, but on average I split my time 60-40 between the two businesses, with 60% of my time running Caraa and 40% nurturing Mercado Famous. Even though Mercado Famous is still much smaller than Caraa, it is a brand in its infancy and requires a lot of attention from us, which we are pleased to speculate in.
What have been the growth/revenue trajectories for each Caraa and Mercado Famous?
While we do not publicly disclose revenue numbers, Caraa is on track to have revenues of lower than $20 million this yr and Mercado Famous is on track to have revenues of lower than $5 million.
Caraa reported total sales of over $50 million, and Mercado Famous surpassed $1 million in its first yr.
What is your best advice for people trying to start their very own business full-time?
Do it with passion and never let funds influence your decision to begin a side business. The road to entrepreneurship is long, dark and never straight. You will find difficult moments that may test you, especially when you have greater than one company or job. This is where your passion will kick in and assist you to move forward, even if you do not see any financial gains at the end of the road.