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 at $12 each. In the end we were able to donate 100% of CovidCandies’ net profits (over $30,000 in gross income) and became the largest Konpeito distributor in the US.