Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2017. All sales figures and forecasts are from 2017: Gymshark expecting £41 million “this year”, Skinnymixers selling almost 6,000 cookbooks a month, Lively raising 4 million in 2016, and Sand Cloud expecting $7 million in sales.
While most new entrepreneurs look for highly innovative business ideas, that big thing nobody has thought of yet, others go for the simple: products that already have a market, a niche where there is already competition, a market where you weren’t the first to arrive. Even so, you can end up building a very profitable company.
All the business ideas below have one thing in common: they are online retailers built on Shopify stores. In fact, they came out of the Build a Bigger Business Contest, they have reached sales in the millions, and they will now start receiving support from Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins because of their international business potential.
There were only two requirements to enter the contest: the store had to run on Shopify, and it had to have at least $1 million in annual sales. These are the winning ideas, which I hope will inspire new entrepreneurs.
1. Ben Francis – Gymshark
Francis founded Gymshark in 2012, and his business was selling a fitness clothing brand aimed at both men and women.
Gymshark is considered the fastest-growing brand in the UK, and expects to turn over £41 million this year, an increase of more than 215% on the previous year.
As you can see, Francis’s idea is neither innovative nor pioneering. In fact, there are plenty of companies specialising in sportswear, but he took advantage of the fitness boom to create something different and bring it to the millions of customers for whom exercise is now a habit.
2. Nikalene Riddle – Skinnymixers
Riddle built an online community around healthy recipes. The community grew in her native Australia, so she and her husband began selling cookbooks with these recipes, since they already knew there was demand for them.
Riddle went from selling 1,500 cookbooks a month to almost 6,000 a month, so she has undoubtedly built a very profitable business around recipes.
As we explained at the time, food, clothing and technology are probably the most profitable businesses.
3. Michelle Cordeiro Grant – Lively
Cordeiro worked as a senior director at Victoria’s Secret for four years. There she noticed that the company was out of touch with part of its customer base, so she decided to start her own business offering affordable lingerie with a better fit and look than Victoria’s Secret could provide.
She went full time on her business idea in 2015, and in 2016 she raised 4 million in a funding round. Cordeiro says she will do for lingerie what Warby Parker did for glasses.
4. Bruno Aschidamini, Steven Ford and Brandon Leibel – Sand Cloud
Sand Cloud was founded in 2014 by three friends who met in San Diego. After talking it over, they quit their jobs and set about creating a line of high-quality beach towels.
In their first year (2015) they made only $30,000 in sales, but by 2016 they had reached $2.5 million. This year they expect to close at $7 million in sales. And they no longer sell only towels: they now sell T-shirts too.
5. Joanna Griffiths – Knixwear
Joanna’s innovative idea was to create a bra that could be worn both at work and at the gym. The idea was very well received on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, where she raised $1.5 million, making it the most successful fashion project in the platform’s history.
Knixwear now has a full line of underwear that has taken shape around customer feedback.
See also: 6 very strange things highly successful people do to come up with ideas and be more creative
As you can see, these ideas don’t reinvent the wheel, but these entrepreneurs managed to create a decent product at a reasonable price within an existing market, and they had the ability and skill to bring that product to market. That’s how good businesses are built, and now…
Featured image: daylon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
