Lemonada.

No snakes, big sails, and the faux leather hustle.

Welcome to Side Ussel School.

Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday.

My name is Chris Gillebeow, your host in this segment.

We take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.

Last week, we heard how a college student flipped used furniture from Facebook Marketplace.

They actually paid off half their tuition bill without ever taking out a loan.

Today, we're going to go to a side hustler who did something very different,

built a passionate following by making snake skin wallets without using a single animal product.

So, as I said, faux leather, faux snake skin, just upcycled materials and a clever story.

I guess in some ways it's reminiscent to near and dear the faux

taxidermy service that I told you about. Well, it's actually an e-commerce business, just like this one

now that I think about it. So yeah, no snakes, big sales, the faux leather hustle. Let's hear

this story. I'm going to pass the microphone to our featured side hustler. I'll be back at the

end with a few words of wrap up. All right. So this whole thing started because I was broke, but I wanted

a snake skin wallet. If that sounds strange, keep in mind that I love the look of real snake skin, the texture,

the slight gloss, but obviously I didn't want to spend $300, and honestly, I wasn't super

comfortable with the whole real snake part either. So I was at this fabric recycling place,

kind of like a thrift store, but for random materials, and I just started digging through bins, leather scraps, old car upholstery, weird vinyl samples, and eventually, I found this crinkly, textured vinyl that looked kind of like snake skin.

Not exactly high fashion, but it was convincing enough. I grabbed a few pieces for maybe $10 total, took them home, and stitched together a wallet using the cheapest sewing tools I had. Honestly, it was rough. Like, you would not have been impressed. But when I showed it to a couple friends, they were like, wait, that's fake? That's awesome. Can you make me one? And that's when the light bulb went off.

I opened an Etsy shop.

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