This Facet Hustle Highlight Q&A options New York Metropolis-based husband-and-wife founders Lee Kojanis, 37, and Daniele Orellana, 34. Kojanis is a board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon, and Orellana is a board-certified pediatric dentist. Be taught extra about how they began and grew their facet hustle, Mitts, the model behind an ergonomic sponge designed to scrub delicate glassware. Responses have been edited for size and readability.
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Mitts. Lee Kojanis and Daniele Orellana.
When did you begin your facet hustle, and the place did you discover the inspiration for it?
Orellana: The thought for Mitts was born throughout the pandemic when Lee was getting ready for his Wine & Spirit Training Belief (WSET) exams. With elective surgical procedures on maintain, he took benefit of the additional downtime to deepen his data of wine — certainly one of his long-time passions. The tasting portion of the certification required a ton of wine sampling at house, which, in flip, meant a whole lot of wine tasting and a rising assortment of delicate, high-end stemware in want of cautious cleansing.
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Kojanis: Daniele typically took on the duty of washing these fragile glasses, however their skinny, hand-blown design made them notoriously troublesome to scrub with out breakage — leading to tons of of {dollars}’ value of shattered stemware. Annoyed by the shortage of a cleansing instrument that offered each precision and safety, we started brainstorming over a bottle of wine one weekend. That dialog sparked the idea for Mitts: a sponge designed particularly for cleansing delicate stemware, providing improved management and ergonomic dealing with.
Orellana: We additionally needed to ensure it was sensible and aesthetic. Lots of the merchandise marketed towards wine and wine glasses have been both impractical when it comes to use or cumbersome and regarded horrible on our kitchen counter, so we designed one thing we might wish to show on our personal counter that served a couple of use — which is why the bottom is vital to every Starter Kitt.
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Mitts
What have been a number of the first steps you took to get your facet hustle off the bottom?
Kojanis: The morning after our concept we got here up with Mitts, we instantly began doing market analysis. Initially, we reached out to a number of engineering companies, greater than 5 in complete. After a number of emails and Zoom conferences, we finally selected Inventive Engineering, a specialised agency based mostly in New York.
The prototyping course of took a number of months and required a number of iterations to refine the design. As soon as we finalized a model that match our imaginative and prescient, we filed a utility patent with the USPTO. From there, we turned our focus to branding, collaborating with Make Tremendous Good, a inventive company that helped us develop our title, visible id and packaging design.
Are there any free or paid sources which were particularly useful for you in beginning and working this enterprise?
Orellana: Consider it or not, one of the vital invaluable sources has been ChatGPT. Coming from healthcare, we had little to no expertise navigating the CPG house. ChatGPT grew to become a useful instrument in growing a go-to-market technique and simply answering very fundamental enterprise questions. Past AI-powered help, our engineering, branding and manufacturing companions performed huge roles in guiding us by way of unfamiliar territory. They have been extremely useful and obtainable to us as we have been on the brink of launch.
Moreover, the StartupCPG group has been an unimaginable useful resource. Everybody there was supportive by providing networking alternatives and sensible recommendation. Its Slack group has turn into one of many key locations I flip to once I’m uncertain or caught.
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In the event you might return in your enterprise journey and alter one course of or method, what wouldn’t it be, and the way do you want you’d carried out it in a different way?
Kojanis: If we might return and alter one side of our launch technique, it might be the timing and administration of our product launch. We formally launched in November 2024, proper within the midst of the vacation rush, with out having our full stock available at our 3PL facility. Manufacturing estimates have been overly optimistic, and unexpected delivery delays meant that a good portion of our product did not arrive in time for the vacation season.
In hindsight, we must always have both deliberate way more conservatively for peak-season logistics or delayed our launch till after the vacations, when success timelines would have been extra predictable. Higher contingency planning — equivalent to constructing in further buffer time for manufacturing and delivery — would have saved us vital stress and ensured a smoother rollout. It was a tricky however beneficial lesson within the significance of timing and provide chain preparedness.
In the case of this particular enterprise, what’s one thing you have discovered notably difficult and/or stunning that individuals who get into this sort of work must be ready for, however seemingly aren’t?
Kojanis: Rejection is fixed. Clients will reject you, influencers will reject you, companies will reject you, and buyers will reject you. You need to take criticism effectively and roll with the punches. What’s helped us is studying to separate emotion from suggestions — each rejection is knowledge. If somebody says no, we ask why and use that perception to refine our pitch, product or method. The important thing is not avoiding rejection; it is utilizing it to get higher.
Are you able to recall a particular occasion when one thing went very fallacious? How did you repair it?
Kojanis: We have been unable to fill a big portion of vacation orders as a result of manufacturing and delivery delays. Many shoppers bought Mitts in hopes of gifting them to family and friends, and we fell brief. As a way to make it proper, we personally emailed all prospects whose orders we have been unable to satisfy in time and supplied low cost codes for future orders.
How lengthy did it take you to see constant month-to-month income? How a lot did the facet hustle earn?
Kojanis: We’re solely three months into our launch, and month-to-month income has fluctuated. We’ve got solely not too long ago began a constant advertising marketing campaign and hope to see extra constant gross sales transferring ahead. In the mean time, the hustle has introduced in simply over $15,000. We’re projecting about $75,000 in gross sales this 12 months.
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What does progress and income appear like now?
Orellana: Progress and income for us ideally is tripling our present income by the top of the 12 months, and we’re slated to be in our first retail house this spring with Pop-up Grocer. We hope so as to add a handful of small retail outlets by the top of the 12 months. There isn’t any non-public capital or funding in Mitts — it is all us, and we’re dedicated to sluggish natural progress.
Picture Credit score: Courtesy of Mitts
How a lot time do you spend engaged on your enterprise on a each day, weekly or month-to-month foundation? How do you construction that point? What does a typical day or week of labor appear like for you?
Orellana: As docs, we each have demanding full-time jobs, so we’re virtually all the time working both in non-public observe or on Mitts. Mitts-related work occurs all through the workday and evenings; it occurs in between sufferers, throughout lunch, on the best way to and from work. We reply to emails or hop on Zoom calls all through the day — anybody who has labored with us has taken a Zoom assembly with us in our scrubs.
Our weekends are additionally allotted to greater Mitt-related obligations (like photoshoots, videography, and many others). We’re additionally actually good at allocating and splitting mandatory duties between the 2 of us. We realized early on in our relationship as a pair that communication is vital to a robust and wholesome marriage. We use that very same mentality with our joint enterprise: Talk early and sometimes.
What do you get pleasure from most about working this enterprise?
Kojanis: Mitts has allowed us to work collectively in ways in which would have in any other case by no means been potential in our common careers. The very best a part of this startup is that we get to spend time collectively working in direction of shared objectives whereas concurrently selling a tangible product that we created from scratch.
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What’s your greatest piece of particular, actionable enterprise recommendation?
Orellana: Earlier than sinking vital money and time into product growth, branding or stock, do thorough market analysis. Have interaction in direct outreach — ship samples to your target market, collect suggestions and refine your concept based mostly on real-world knowledge. Additionally, be strategic about your launch and ensure to construct buzz previous to your launch; it makes an enormous distinction.
Kojanis: For us, that meant creating an early prototype of our stemware sponge, getting it into the palms of wine fanatics and bartenders and utilizing their suggestions to enhance the design earlier than committing to large-scale manufacturing. That iterative course of gave us proof of idea and a transparent path ahead.
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