COVID CANDIES
Amid the 2020 COVID lockdowns, my family sheltered in our house, where we all had COVID. While energy and morale was low, I wondered why no one had created a cheeky product about COVID, but quickly realized major platforms would ban anything with its name. I began to design CovidCandies—a limited-edition bag of a spiky sugar candy called Konpeito, featuring caricatures of Fauci, Rosie the Riveter, Trump, and others. I called up the best engineer I knew, Ryan, to launch a website and begin operations. Once I secured manufacturing for 250lbs of Konpeito overseas, we began to print the CovidCandies bags. The company itself would be a 2,500 package limited edition brand, allowing us to sell bags at $12 each. Since we couldn’t advertise with the name “Covid”, I cold-emailed thousands of news stations, eventually catching the attention of Entrepreneur Magazine and Good Morning America, which skyrocketed our sales. Within a month, we had orders from across North America, employed friends and family to help bag and ship in Ryan’s garage, and sold out all 2,500 bags. In the end we were able to donate 100% of CovidCandies’ profits (over $30,000), and became the largest Konpeito distributor in the US.