At age 12, Bella Lynn had a problem. His guinea pigs were disappearing.
At the time, Lynn let her three guinea pigs roam in her parents’ grassy, fenced yard outside of San Francisco. It was better than the alternative, he thought: Lin, now 17, tells CNBC Make It that the two-pound creatures looked “miserable” in their tight cages “with prison bars.”
He assumed that the first one, Snoopy, had escaped and continued to let his guinea pigs out, until his father saw one of the eagles flying off with another, he remembers. Determined to keep pets out of traditional cages, she began drawing prototypes.
Lin, a senior at the Khan Lab School in Mountain View, California, went through several models and invested about $2,000 of his savings to launch his side business, GiniLoft, on Amazon in November 2022.
He sold about 11,000 cages and brought in more than $410,000 in revenue last year — an average of about $34,000 a month, according to documents reviewed by Make It.
In addition to academic courses, extracurricular activities and college applications, Lynn works about 20 hours a week at GuineaLoft. That’s how he built a side business so successful that he’s considering delaying college to focus on it.
An unprofitable side business led to an “epiphany.”
Lin told his father, a computer programmer, that he wanted to build a better cage. Lin says he had contact with a family factory in China through a former client and was introduced to him.
A year after the prototypes, Lin was distracted by another idea: He wanted to sell sportswear for girls at a lower price than the big fashion brands. She did her research, found another factory in China, contacted them, and created a business plan to sell leggings starting at $23.
That side business, called TLeggings, launched in July 2019. That brought in about $300,000 in revenue in 2020, she says. It also got Lin into BizWorld, a project-based entrepreneurship program for 16- to 22-year-olds.
He completed the 12-week course and worked with a business mentor, but did not win the project pitch competition or the cash prize at the end of the program. TLeggings was one of the few signs of failure: despite high revenues, the company was never profitable, and Lynn had trouble keeping up with its competitors.
He called it quits in early 2022 and returned to focus on Ginniloft.
“I had a weird epiphany where I realized there were a lot of companies trying to make leggings,” Lynn says. “There was no innovation, whereas with Ginniloft, I was able to fill a really big gap in the market.”
Working between classes and late into the night
Lin realized that his early prototypes were promising, but imperfect.
Traditional guinea pig cages are made with canvas or plastic bars, roofs and bottoms. They are difficult to clean and often have a fecal-urine feel, Lin says.
Its early glass and open-floor enclosures allowed for greater visibility and mobility, and were two-tiered at the rear. Soiled bedding can be placed in a removable plastic tray. But the glass was too expensive and the little guinea pig’s feet would get stuck in the ground.
Lin rearranged her schedule so she could do homework between classes. He stayed late in China to research and virtually test products with his team of six: a manufacturing manager who works for the factory and five full-time Ginniloft employees who had previously worked with Lin’s father or the fabric’s management.
Lynn explains that these six people are responsible for purchasing, manufacturing, packaging and photographing the products. Lynn manages GuineaLoft’s product design, pricing, marketing (she says TLeggings taught her a lot about social media), and overall business strategy.
In the end, the company chose acrylic over glass and made replaceable bottoms of wax-coated biodegradable paper, similar, Lin says, to “airplane vomit bags.”
Throwing away funds is easy, which is good for business: When satisfied Ginniloft customers run out of them, they have to return to Lin’s Amazon store to replenish stock.
Win a $10,000 contest
The factory produced 100 cages in its first batch. Lynn was overjoyed when three were sold in the first few hours.
Within two weeks, Ginniloft was out of the top 100 “without any marketing,” he says. Last year he entered BizWorld again and won $10,000 in investment funds in the competition. That money will go toward adding accessories and new cages for a variety of small pets like rabbits and hamsters, he explains.
Lynn explains that 25% of each cage’s profit margin is immediately reinvested in marketing, market research and new product development.
That means he hasn’t pocketed any money yet, but when he applies to college, he plans to spend a year after high school visiting a factory in China, learning more about manufacturing and growing his business.
“Witnessing the tangible effects of (Giniloft cages) through customer comments and emails is encouraging,” says Lynn. has increased.”
This article was originally published in English by Megan Sauer for our sister network CNBC.com. For more from CNBC go here.
