17-year-old Bella Lin, who just graduated from high school, has turned an idea that started as a daily hassle into a successful business. With her unique entrepreneurial idea and perseverance, the business brings in roughly US$71,000 monthly.
According to CNBC’s Make It, Bella Lin’s entrepreneurial journey began when she was 12. She had to spend an hour every week cleaning guinea pig cages. The experience of scraping, scrubbing, and washing excrement off her cages prompted Lin to design her cages that were easier to clean.
Lin recalled: “It feels like cleaning a miniature portable toilet.”
This taxing and disgusting experience inspired Lin’s creativity. She began designing her guinea pig cages: first sketching them on paper, then making them out of bricks and plastic in her backyard in Sunnyvale, California, and eventually producing them at her factory in Hangzhou, China.
Bella Lin’s GuineaLoft
GuineaLoft, founded by Bella Lin, is a brand that focuses on small pet products. Its main product is easy-to-clean guinea pig cages. These cages have acrylic walls and a disposable wax-coated paper bottom, greatly simplifying the cleaning process. After about a year of research and development, the product was officially launched in November 2022 and quickly won the favor of consumers on the Amazon platform.
According to data, GuineaLoft’s average monthly revenue this year has reached US$71,000, more than double last year’s average monthly revenue of US$34,000. Bella Lin attributed the growth to a US$10,000 prize won in an entrepreneurship competition last October, which she used to purchase an acrylic laser cutter that dramatically improved production efficiency.
Bella Lin’s entrepreneurial spirit was evident as early as when she was 7 years old. With the encouragement of her computer programmer father, she was always trying out different ways to earn a small amount of money, from running a lemonade stand to selling hand-knit scarves.
Once, on the way to water polo practice, Lin looked up a pair of Lululemon leggings and was shocked at the price. She recalls her father asking: “What do you think is the mark-up price for this?”
The two looked it up and found that most leggings made from a similar fabric to a pair of Lululemon’s cost about US$20 to produce. The conversation led to TLeggings, another one of Lin’s side hustles that generated US$300,000 in sales at its peak in 2020. She believes that parents must support their children’s entrepreneurial ideas.
She said: “My father always treated me like an adult, like someone working alongside him.”
Bella Lin put 100 of GuineaLoft’s signature cages for sale on Amazon, which sold out within two weeks. Sales have continued to climb. GuineaLoft’s Amazon storefront also sells hay feeders, no-drip water bottles for guinea pigs, acrylic cages, and accessories for hamsters, rabbits, and birds.
During the expansion of the product line, Lin faced many challenges, but she rose to the challenge. For example, when developing hamster cages, she improved the design several times to solve the problem of animals escaping.
GuineaLoft employs six full-time employees to develop, build, and test the products, but it is still a side hustle for Bella Lin. She recently graduated from high school and is moving to the University of Chicago to study economics, but she will still devote 30 hours a week to corporate operations. Despite the company’s profitability, Lin hasn’t started paying herself a salary and instead has chosen to reinvest all profits into business development.
Looking to the future, Bella Lin hopes to introduce products to physical stores. “Opening a physical store is a big goal for me,” she said. “My ultimate wish is to make GuineaLoft a well-known brand in the field of small pet products.”
Translated by Chew
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