Covid Influencers: Who Is Risa Hoshino?

I ran out of bikinis to sell. And since the novelty was wearing off anyway, I decided not to order a 3rd round of inventory. You have to buy this stuff in bulk to get a good price.

> Where did you source your material

Dongguan Humen Yihao Clothing Co., Ltd. (not sure, I believe they were called differently back then)

But MOQ was 1000+ pieces each for 5+ designs, so 5000 bikinis in total.

> Who did designs?

An Italian guy "designed" the bikinis, took some of the photos, setup Instagram, Shopify, etc, and started selling. He then sold the company to me when he got bored with it. "designed" because he actually booked a Vietnamese illustration team on UpWork to do the design sketches and then sent those sketches to a Chinese company for manufacturing.

> Any funny stories?

This is a semi-public forum, so no. You can probably imagine which topics feature heavily when young guys running a startup hire models to sell partially see-through bikinis. And I'm guessing you can also imagine how publicly reciting these stories could get me into trouble in today's political correctness culture.

But maybe some interesting facts:

Renting space in a fulfillment warehouse is surprisingly cheap. Like $100 monthly + $1 per order.

With the correct business contract, DHL will express-ship your parcel from HK to the US for $9. As a regular consumer, it's $140 in shipping fees. That means returns would cost more in shipping fees than the value of the goods, so we usually redirected them to red cross or other clothing donation drop-offs.

Each year, more than 250 self-proclaimed Instagram models sent us unsolicited underwear (and/or nude) photos to ask for free merchandise.

The bikini equivalent of 2x $2.5 in manufacturing + $9 shipping will buy you a 1-week promotion where an Instagram yoga girl will wear your stuff for her retreat and tag you on selfies 3x daily.

About 1 out of 10 of our collaboration partners asked for permission to sell the used bikinis to their fans after the promotion was over.

Roughly half of the Influencers that contacted us pretended to have worked for international fashion brands. None of them (sample size ~ 400) managed to provide any proof when I asked.

Also roughly half of the Influencers that contacted us were participating in one or more MLM schemes and offered to recruit us. That's why almost every yoga instructor is also giving nutrition and makeup advice and links to their "favorite" mat on Amazon.