We love interviewing our incredible students at Georgia Cyber Academy (GCA) and showcasing them on our podcast: Hootworthy. Karen, a 10th grader at GCA, sat down and discussed her hobby that turned into a surprisingly successful business. In 2020, Karen created her own business, 2UNIQ Collection, where she makes and sells products such as key chains, wristlets, pens, and lanyards. She started with key chains and most recently added lanyards. Her best-selling product is the wristlet.
Not many students start a business, so we discussed Karen’s
“Why?”. Karen shared that she noticed how her mom always seemed to be losing
her keys. She began making key chains, and then the wristlet idea came next.
Her business solved a real problem—offered a solution to losing your keys—what
many successful businesses do. Karen has always been somewhat a creative
person, but she decided to take it to another level with the business.
She acquired her startup funding from her parents, which took six
months of convincing after making a business plan, but she has paid the loan
back and then some! She has been very surprised at how popular and successful
her business has become. She didn’t expect so many people to buy her products.
She has learned many different things from running her business, but a key
takeaway has been money management. For example, she must balance spending
money on materials to then make products for sale.
Despite the success of her business, Karen would like to
ultimately become a real estate broker after high school. She loves the
experience and lessons she is learning from managing her own business, and how
it will apply to her future career in real estate. She enjoys the flexibility
GCA offers for her to do school and work on her business on the side during breaks
or after school work. She has found her teachers always willing to help and her
classmates to be very nice.
We encourage everyone to check out Karen’s products! They can find
them at the website https://uniqcollectionllc.myshopify.com/. Karen ended with shouting out her mom, dad, supporters, Mrs.
McCarthy for recommending her to be on the show, and the Hootworthy team. Stay
Hootworthy, Karen!