Broke Mom to $1.63M Selling Custom Magnets

Sariah Howell was pregnant, broke, and never saw her husband. He was stocking shelves at a grocery store making $14/hour.

📝 From a recent interview…

What could I do on the side from home that could just bring in an extra couple hundred a month?

She’d made a goal to print more family photos. Googling ways to display them, she came across custom photo magnets and a machine that made them.

Put the machine on a credit card and started selling at local farmers markets.

That first month, I think I made a little over $1,000. Not that that’s a crazy amount, but to us that was a lot.

The numbers are 🤯

• Cost per magnet: $0.35
• A 9-pack sells for $25
• That’s ~87% margin on materials alone

First full year: $1.63M in revenue, 30–40% net margins – after labor, booth fees, and lower-margin product lines like DIY kits 🤑

Then she discovered weddings. At her second market ever, a couple kept coming back with more photos. Spent about $225. At the end of the day they walked up and asked…

We’re getting married in a couple months. Would you ever consider being a vendor at our wedding? 💍

A 3-hour wedding gig looks something like this…

• Revenue: $1,200 to $3,000
• Total costs: ~$500 (materials, gas, two staff)
• Net profit: ~$1,500

There are 2.5M weddings per year in the US. Almost none of them have a magnet vendor 👀

I don’t think it will ever be oversaturated. Even here around me, there are a ton of people that have these kits. But how many weddings, how many events? There’s just so much room in this industry.

Total startup cost: under $1,000 for a machine and printer. Go find your nearest farmers market and see if anyone’s already doing this 😎

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