Connect
To Top

Meet Anthony Taylor of Bella Bold in Online

Avatar photo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Anthony Taylor.

Anthony, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Oh man, where do I start…It’s been quite the journey. When I was in 4th grade, my mother was diagnosed with Breast Cancer and fought this horrible disease until I was 16 years old. She later passed away during my Sophomore year of high school and I honestly believe this is what triggered something in my mind to want to be more than average. Life is too short to be working towards someone else’s Lamborghini bill when I could be the one driving the Lamborghini.

In high school, I began getting into Music & did this for about three years. I never had the money for a photographer or graphic designer so I started to develop these skill sets on my own because, at the time, I didn’t want to pay someone else to do this for me, nor did I have the means to. I’m going to be completely vulnerable here…when I graduated high school, my family lost our house back in Indiana & a couple of months later. I moved to California to open up doors for myself in the music industry. I had met a serial entrepreneur named Kenny Sanders on Instagram (You’ll see why this is important later) and was asking him for advice as he lived out in LA and I was inspired by the lifestyle he was living. Once I got there, I ended up living in my car and a tent in the mountains for an entire year, after things just didn’t work out. I even brushed my teeth with ocean water and took a shower in a Scuba Diving station…It was all a learning experience…

A year later, I moved all the way back to Indiana (in 2016) & worked at Burlington Coat Factory for a while to stack my money back up, however, I knew I didn’t want to stay there. I began looking into E-Commerce after getting hit with ads on Instagram & Facebook all of the time. I decided to build a Shopify store but had no idea how to actually sell any products on it so I eventually abandoned it (If you’re wondering what Shopify is. It is an online platform that you can build stores and sell products on). After saving my money up, I decided I wanted to move to Denver and be near the mountains, as they have always been an inspiration to me & felt like home. I found a little apartment downtown in late 2016 & made the move. I transferred my Burlington job out here, but it wasn’t paying the bills and my savings were running out fast. On top of this, all of my stuff got stolen my second week here & I ended up blowing through it all even faster trying to recoupe from that. I almost moved back home, but something was telling me to just stay and push through the rough times, although I only had $25 left in my bank account. I started applying to better-paying jobs that day & ended up getting a job at a tech startup called Rally Health a week later, with literally $5 left to my name.

After getting the job at Rally & a year later (2018) I finally had the finances & time to start going out and meeting people in the area as I had no friends or family here. This is where it all started to come together & make sense. I met a kid named Sid out here who was also from Indianapolis, IN & he introduced me to a kid named Steven, who is now a very good friend of mine. Steven does E-Commerce & is very very successful with this. I can remember going to his house & being like, wow…this is a literal castle & this kid is absolutely killing it. Seeing his success immediately sparked my interest back up in E-Commerce & I told myself that I have to make this work & figure it out. In January 2018, I began to go to my full-time 9-5, work on my business there, & then put in hours on hours of work afterward – studying Facebook ads, building a store on Shopify, and following successful people in this realm of work, such as Grant Cardone, Chris Waller, & Tim Ferris. My social life took a huge toll & most people thought I was going crazy honestly.

A couple of months later, after building the correct mindset & studying/developing the habits of millionaires, I decided it was time to launch my store & ads. Three weeks later, I was bringing in about $100-$500 profit per day. Although I was excited, The momentum began to die out because I didn’t know how to properly run a business like this, so I shut it down & began studying more. I ended up running across Kenny on Instagram again 6-years later, in October of 2018 & hit him up because I saw that he was in a band. Thanks to my new skill set with Facebook Ads, I offered to run ads for the band & increase their listeners on Spotify, which ended up going really well. On a fall afternoon, about a month later (I was probably drinking pumpkin spice coffee lol), Kenny reached out and asked if I knew what E-Commerce was. I was literally working on my store when he asked me this question, so I sent him a screenshot & let him know that this is what I have been working on for the past 9 months. We ended up partnering up with each other on this store & the rest was history.

We decided to start a skincare brand called Bella Bold & launched it two months later – in December of 2018. We made $10k by the end of the month, then January hit & we did $50k, then February hit & we did $173k. We had no idea what was happening but we knew we had to keep scaling this & focus on what was working. By March, we were doing a steady $200k a month. We started to hire customer service employees and automate our entire business, so we could enjoy our lives and focus on investing our money into bigger things. It is now August 2019 as I am writing this, I’m no longer working a 9-5 and we have done over $1,000,000 within the past 9 months. This was able to become possible through the power of social media marketing, Kenny’s amazing sourcing experience, & the ability to use my self-taught skill sets in design & photography from six-years ago to make our brand stand out above the rest. Our lives have completely changed, I quit my job at Rally 5 months ago, & our business has been growing into a powerful brand ever since.

Exactly six years ago I was living in my car. Exactly 3-years ago, I had $5 left in my bank account. Now, through E-Commerce, I can make thousands a day now while I’m at Disney World, at a best-friends wedding, visiting family, or even while sleeping every night. We have developed true passive income in the online sales space.

However, we’ve honestly started to get pretty bored, so we decided to start two more companies revolving around the E-Commerce space. One is called EcommVikings, where we run Facebook Ads for other businesses & help them scale their revenue by 10x-20x per year. The other is EcommAgent.com, where we connect stores & brands with high-quality sourcing for their products to ensure fast delivery times for their customers, a long with quality control, no distribution fees, & custom branding at no cost.

E-Commerce & the internet is such a powerful tool & it doesn’t take much to get started. We both threw in about $100 each to get everything going & we now run a million-dollar business only a year later. Anything is possible no matter your situation in life. If you feel like you’re at rock bottom or don’t like the people you are surrounding yourself with, choose to take control and make a change. It only takes one second to make the decision. Most successful entrepreneurs have been through some of the roughest times, so remember that you are never alone in the journey.

If there’s one piece of advice that I can offer, it’s this – If you’re thinking about doing something but are unsure how to do it…simply just get started. It doesn’t have to be directly related to the business your starting, but just start working on your mindset, your skills, & everything else will begin to fall into place. You also don’t have to re-invent the wheel. See what is working for others & duplicate the steps that they took. Study them every single day, until you understand how they did it.

If you’re ever looking for motivation, inspiration, or just some personal advice to get started, you can reach out to me directly on Instagram. I’m always around to help others see their potential & I truly believe that anyone can do this. Especially the one who’s reading this right now.

Has it been a smooth road?
This made me laugh…We have had days where we have been on the verge of having mental breakdowns. When I say days, I actually mean weeks at a time. We make 90% of our sales through Facebook Ads & our advertising accounts have constantly been shut down. They never give a reason, however, one time we were shut down because the bots in the system thought we were selling Surveillance systems.

Obviously, when this happens we take a huge cut in sales. We’ve learned from this over the past few months & have begun diversifying our traffic platforms by using Google Ads, Snapchat Ads, Etc.

Another huge issue – Around Christmas, we were working with a supplier who didn’t tell us the manufacturer ran out-of-stock of the product we were selling & we had over 800 orders that could not be fulfilled. We ended up having to email all of these customers to explain the situation & lost nearly $30,000 because of this. We began trying to find a different supplier so that this would never happen again and ended up finding an amazing sourcing agent who has completely changed the way our company works, for the better.

We run into issues every day, to be honest, but that is part of being an Entrepreneur. One thing that I have learned over time is – if you’re not running into bigger and bigger problems as time goes by, you’re not doing enough. The more your company grows and the bigger it gets, the more issues you run into. 90% of the time, they’re big ones. You have to learn to love it though.

Please tell us about your business.
So we’re just two guys who sell skincare online. We specifically started with Dropshipping – which is where you build an online website, import products, & run traffic to your site. Here’s a more simple breakdown:
– Build a website on Shopify
– Import Product/s From Aliexpress
– Set your selling price for the product
– Drive traffic to your website
– Ex. – When someone purchases a product on our site for $200, the order is then fulfilled by our employees who enter the customers shipping address for delivery. We then pay the $50 wholesale price on AliExpress to fulfill the order and keep the $150 profit.

As a company, we are extremely proud of our customer service. We set our standards as high as Amazon & offer probably some of the highest quality customer support out there. Especially within this Niche.

We are a little different than other skincare companies, as we sell both Women’s & Men’s skincare all in one place. We know a lot of guys who are afraid to walk into Ulta or Sephora & buy skincare for themselves so we wanted to create a store online where there is no shame. That’s actually why the name is called Bella Bold. Bella for Her. Bold for Him.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
We luckily got into a very evergreen niche. The industry has been around for years on years & it will only continue to get bigger as the online space grows. With physical locations going out of business, online companies like our own are truly going to take over the industry and become the highest in demand. A lot of people think that Amazon will run these online businesses out, but that is far from the truth. People still love ordering from brands & the whole tailored experience that comes with it.

Pricing:

  • Online Advertising: $2500 – $10K/month
  • Personal Mentorship: $1500 – $2500/month
  • Shopify Store Builds: $2000
  • EcommAgent.com: $99 (One Time Fee)

Contact Info:

Suggest a story: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.

Related Items

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in