Skida is 20-year-old Corinne Prevot’s company that sells hats, bandanas and neckwarmers aimed at skiers, and it’s a Shopify shop. She started selling hats when she was 17, carrying her inventory to her local sports shop, without any idea of what to charge. Three years later, she’s got a profitable company that made $100,000 in sales in the last 12 months (almost half of which was profit), she’s selling hats in 47 brick-and-mortar shops across the U.S. and she’s also moving her stuff online with Shopify (click here to visit her online store).
Just as “write what you know” is popular advice from many writing schools, “sell what you know” seems to be the lesson from Corinne’s example. An avid skier, she switched from downhill to cross-country skiing while in high school at a “skiing-focused boarding school” (why did I not know about the existence of such things?). Downhill skiing has all sorts of fashion options (perhaps only snowboarding, the superior sport IMHO, gives you even more), but Corinne noted that cross-country skiers had only “kind of black and knitted” stuff to choose from. That might’ve been an acceptable choice for a Montrealer, but Corinne “wanted something more interesting”. And thus Skida was born.
Here’s Corinne in a quick video interview for Forbes; her story also appears online in an article titled All-Star Student Entrepreneurs: Hat Trick. The article is one of a series covering students who are attending school full-time and running businesses making six figures; they were invited to a special summit hosted by Michael Dell, “the original dorm room entrepreneur”.
As always, if you’d like to find out more about Shopify, you know who to call.