BUILDING A vertically INTEGRATED DTC BRAND
From the Ground Up: SugarSky
SugarSky
What started with sewing headbands in my 300-square-foot apartment turned into something much bigger. Over the next six years, SugarSky grew from a one-woman operation into a full-fledged brand DTC brand with a small team, U.S. manufacturing partners, wholesale accounts, and customers all over the country. I'm grateful to have learned every part of the business: designing products, sewing products, sourcing fabric, building and running the website, social, marketing, selling wholesale, managing production, packing orders and, eventually, figuring out how to hand some of those things off as we grew. SugarSky is where I learned how all the pieces of a business fit together. And, without really knowing it at the time, it’s where I fell in love with ecommerce.
FROM THE ARCHIVES: SUGARSKY'S MISSION STATEMENT
"Here at SugarSky, we exist to encourage and empower everyone who comes in contact with our products — those who design, make, sell, buy, gift and wear them."
the beginning
From my 300sf Apartment
After I saved up a few dollar from corporate America, I took the leap and left to start SugarSky, a made-in-the-USA headwear and accessories DTC brand where we designed, printed, cut and sewed fun-patterned products from eco-friendly, UV-rated material. Eventually, our product line crew significantly but IT ALL STARTED WITH A HEADBAND that was wearable 4 different ways.
Every headband left with a hand-stamped kraft paper tag tied on with twine. It wasn’t fancy, but it was what I could afford.
My dad was an avid photographer and helped me rig up a makeshift studio for SugarSky’s first product photos.
Our first professional photoshoot. I remember seeing this image for the first time and feeling like the brand I’d pictured in my head was finally becoming real.
The first wholesale line sheet. With some nudging from people smarter than me, I started pursuing retail pretty early on. It ended up becoming an important part of the business.
From One Woman Show to 5,000-Piece Order
And Then It Grew
I realized I couldn’t keep sewing everything myself. So I found two amazing seamstresses who started sewing alongside me, and suddenly SugarSky had a little production team.
We were pretty scrappy and I landed a huge subscription box order for 5,000 pieces. I remember absolutely freaking out. How in the world were we going to make 5,000 of anything?
I designed and sourced all of the fabric, designed dyelines and had new packaging cards created, wrote copy, figured out exactly what we needed to make and when, and planned production out over the next 2 months. Then we got to work.
Somehow, between our three homes and a whole lot of sewing, we made all 5,000 pieces and shipped the entire order on time.
It was a huge win, but it also made something pretty obvious: I couldn’t keep doing things this way if SugarSky was going to keep growing. I knew I had to put some processes and partnerships in place to be able to scale.
Turns out, sewing 5,000 headbands was only half the battle. My mom, my husband and I packaged every single one.
We had to create new packaging for the order, including figuring out how to keep the headbands from sliding right off the cards.
The packing list. 5,540 headbands ordered on 12/23/16 and shipped just a little over 2 months later.
SugarSky sitting alongside Manduka and Lander in the subscription box, circa 2017.
Figuring out how to scale
We Needed a Better Way
After the subscription box order, I knew we couldn't do that again, so we started weighing options and eventually landed a partnership with a USA-based print / cut / sew shop.
We were the first brand like SugarSky they’d ever worked with, and I’d never handed our production over to anyone before, so there was a lot of figuring it out together.
Little by little, we worked through how to take products we’d been making ourselves for years and make them there instead... still in our home state of Colorado.
Once we were moving and grooving, we knew we could start expanding our product line.
In 2018, SugarSky grew beyond the headband that started it all. We added tubes, bandanas, and scrunchies... always printed from our own designs. I started seeing a much bigger, more full version of SugarSky come to life.
