Recently had the pleasure to speaking with VayageLA !
Here’s a snippet, full article link:
http://voyagela.com/interview/meet-mario-gonzalez-wazhappinin-hollywood/
Thanks for sharing your story with us Mario. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
The story of Wazhappinin started by my girlfriend introducing me to the pin world in mid 2016. I discovered that multiple companies had made pins of some of my favorite characters, mashed up as one! Once I found out that this was possible, I quickly took on to google and searched “how to start a pin business”. I read and researched a ton of articles, watched videos, and even though I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, I decided I was going to go for it. With one design and 100 pcs of that one design, I launched Wazhappinin in November of 2016. The design was of “bowlbasaur” the pokemon with a marijuana nug on its back instead of its normal leaf design. The community loved it, and it sold out in less than a month. With this excitement, I reinvested all my earnings and kept pushing out more designs and variants of sold out designs. I started with no advertising and kept networking with other companies to get my name out there. In less than two years my company grew to acquire over 5,000 followers and happy customers around the world! Now we continue to produce our designs as well as making pins for other companies, including some popular bands!
Has it been a smooth road?
It has not been all happy sailings since I started! I’ve had to change manufacturing companies multiple times and had to learn the hard way about what is the best price you can get while maintaining the best quality for your products. Shipping errors can occur as well and packages can get lost or stolen, The biggest issue I’ve dealt with is having to replace lost packages for customers. I hate having my customers wait for something they paid for and always want them happy so they can return. But we all learn from our mistakes, so all we can do is push forward and try avoiding these issues so it doesn’t happen again.