Behind each product on the supermarket shelf resides a story. A person. A passion. Someone who dared to venture outside their comfort zone. What we see, didn’t just happen. Meet Five Dot Botanics and its founder, Zaffrin O’Sullivan. The media lawyer began blogging about honey in 2015 while on maternity leave. Buzzing with interest, Zaffrin carefully balanced work, parenthood and her blog.
Like all who take their day with a side of hustle, Zaffrin knew no 9-5. She’d harness the cracks of time within her busy schedule as moments of opportunity.
“I do something on my business every single day, no matter how busy I am. Whether that’s just 40 minutes on my commute or later after I put my kids to bed,” explains Zaffrin.
Whilst time was pressed, she’d cultivated an environment to learn about skin care and business in general. Zaffrin’s blog grew an interest in beeswax from which she developed her own beauty products. This was the launch pad for Five Dot Botanics.
Taking (skin) care of your Side Hustle
Five Dot Botanics makes high performance botanical skincare. Using five or less ingredients with no synthetics, the company use extracts from plants, seeds, nuts and flowers. They do this so the end user perfectly understands what’s in every product. It’s about transparency. It’s about feeding the demand of the discerning buyer.
Five Dot Botanics products are vegan and nutrient rich, formulated to restore skin’s balance, texture and radiance.
In business, knowledge is always power. And Zaffrin put her years of hard work to play when developing the Five Dot Botanics’ brand and digital presence.
A successful online setup shouldn’t be about you. Make it about them. The buyers. The people who care about what you do and what you can offer them. That’s what Zaffrin did. She tailored her online marketing to directly appeal to the wants, needs and desires of her target audience.
“I run everything from my smartphone. So having a website has been key to Five Dot Botanics. The online platform is where we showcase what we do.”
“Our website,” continues Zaffrin, “is home to content designed to engage our end users. And, to keep them hooked, it allows them to register their interest in what we do.”
You might think starting a business is tough. And of course, if it was a breeze everybody would do. But it’s not everyone is it, it’s you. You’re the one with the passion and, like Zaffrin, your passion is what you were born to do.
“Starting my own business was relatively easy,” she says. “I started out small so there was not a lot to lose but a whole lot of learning to be gained.”
Follow Five Dot Botanics on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Side Hustle Report: A Way of Life, Not Work
Zaffrin and Five Dot Botanics’ features in research released by GoDaddy and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) which reveals that side hustling is a growing trend in the UK.
The number of side hustlers – individuals who run their own business on top of their day job – has risen by 32% in the last decade.
The report, ‘Side Hustle: A Way of Life, Not Work’, casts a light on surprising details about the side hustling population in the UK, including that 44% of side hustlers are parents with at least one child under 19 living at home.
Check it out here:
