Welcome to the Getting Sh*t Done in Business podcast! Today, Jackie is joined by Kai Nas of Luxendary. Kai shares the exciting highs and challenging lows of building his custom iPhone case business. From changing strategies to tackling unexpected obstacles, Kai’s journey is a powerful example of determination and creativity.
00:00 [Music] woke up early in the morning grab my coffee now I’m roaring ready to face the day and getting all right well welcome to the getting sh*t done in business podcast by chops Consulting my name is Jackie I’ll be your host today I’m an operation specialist with chops Consulting I’ve been with the company for two and a half years now and worked on a variety of projects across a few different Industries now um we Branch out into Tech operations and marketing services for our clients and today we’ve got a fantastic guest
00:32 joining us um who’s going to tell us a little bit more about their business and their Journey as they developed it as well as some of their challenges and how they’ve had to Pivot in their business strategies so I’d like to welcome we’ve got Kai here today hello hi everyone my name is Kai Nas thank you Jackie thank you for inviting me welcome to have you yeah so telling us a little bit about your company about your journey and how you developed luxendary yes my company is called Lux and uh we make custom made iPhone cases
01:05 um The Journey started back in 2015 uh we actually started the the company uh together with my boss as a branch of the company uh that I worked in uh for him uh and so we were selling cell phone accessories Chargers case uh yeah Chargers cases and stuff like that and we have received a couple of uh uh inquiries about uh White labeling products so when yeah when we received a big inquiry from uh American Express they wanted to do a collaboration with us open on power Banks actually and so we started yeah they they were giving
01:50 them away it was 10,000 pieces and so when I started uh reaching out to uh to manufacturers who could uh facilitate uh and produce an order like that um it turned out that it’s probably worth investing into the equipment and just doing it ourselves and so entrepreneur and me trying to uh you know save the money so I pitched the idea to my boss I told them listen how about we do this and so another one of these projects is going to pay uh for the machine itself so the printer is a commercial type of a printer prints on any Surface cost about
02:33 $244,000 so we made a decision to invest into that the deal was Secure and so we purchased the machine we I made it work um and so yep yep and after that we started pitching to all the small businesses hey this is what we do um if you want to give away cool unique uh gifts not just chains and pens you know but actually cell phone accessories and back then 2016 this was something new power Banks you know cases with custom design stuff like that so that’s how we started and then um about a year later I wanted to launch our own brand instead
03:18 of just printing uh other companies logos I wanted to get creative create Unique Designs print them on these cases and sell them to Consumers directly so that’s what we did we launched our website and um actually it was a website plus Etsy store Etsy was oh okay so you had a shop Center too yes yes Etsy was huge to be honest with you for us and I think we were trending a couple of times as you know a featured U uh seller uh and so funny thing happened with Etsy um just because everything is new and you know when you get into the
04:01 creative world you have to deal with things like uh trademark infringement of somebody else’s design so there was this design that I created and it wasn’t done intentionally but it’s just praying hands you probably have seen a sticker with praying hands on the back of a bunch of cars right and so that was one of the designs that I had and so I got a letter from um a famous I don’t know if I can say their name but I I got a assist and assist letter from and his lawyer so apparently uh Drake the artist he has a
04:40 trademark for praying hands and so I I just didn’t know you could trademark something like that um and apparently after doing the research the the whole praying hands um uh still web came from a famous painting uh 1500 uh 15 from 1500s uh I believe the artist name is Durer he’s a German artist yeah so but Drake trademarked it and so we had to take that off the the website and the Etsy store it was our number one seller oh wow so that must have been a bit of a hit yeah it was a bit of a hit it was probably generating about 80% of
05:24 all the orders so wow yeah things like that I had to you know adopt on the flight and so so we had both departments going at the time um direct to Consumer and business to business and then I wanted to focus on direct to Consumer because this I see as something that I could scale and I love automating things and just using technology to boost uh the operations so so my partner didn’t yeah my partner didn’t see that way because his business model was you know business to business uh he deals directly with his distributors and so we
06:08 made a decision that uh we are going to uh split the two companies and so luxendary would become an you know a separate entity so that’s what we did yeah yep yep that’s what we did and um so parted ways still very good friends I Stephen if you’re watching and shout out yeah so since 2018 I started I was running uh luxendary as a separate company a brand of uh with our designs and it’s just phone cases iPhone cases that uh uh we decided to focus on initially it was both Androids and iPhones but iPhones were generating 95%
06:55 of the orders so it just made sense um and and since then um yeah I’m wondering if it has something to do with the type of consumer that goes for the iPhone versus an Android maybe they like the accessories more I don’t know yeah um so you know that’s that’s actually another reason um it’s not just the the market uh choosing iPhone versus Android it’s more of a type of a consumer like you said who wants to uh purchase AKs with a unique design so this type of consumer usually prefers to have an iPhone so okay that’s
07:34 what I was basically Mark research will tell you yeah yeah yeah yeah um and so plus another Trend that I noticed was every time a new iPhone comes out we get a surge of orders for the previous model so I’m assuming when parents get a new case they usually give their old phone to their kids and kids they want the case with designs because you know if you’re if you’re a grownup you just want a solid black case you know no designs no nothing extra probably I’m I’m just like you know assuming but kids love the
08:13 cases with designs and so so yeah so I started interesting the businesses would would want to PIV it and and offer like an iPhone case like you said branded for a couple of different brands for a partnership deal sponsorship so those type of larger deals um do you find yourself pivoting more towards those deals and are you increasing those in volume compared to like your oneoff sales of like the business to Consumer sales yes yes uh thank you for actually bring this up because um initially my assumption was wrong that I should just
08:51 focus on one thing and completely shut the door for the business to business uh because I have been approached multiple times by friends and family family and you know some of my uh older clients to actually do a collaboration or uh uh basically uh do a businesso business type of project and so I always said no I’m too busy and this and that but there were a couple of developments recently that uh actually made me consider this Avenue and so stay tuned we are actually planning on officially launching a busino business uh service department
09:32 program that’s awesome so yeah this is something that we’re definitely uh very actively working on uh not only business to business but also business to US government agencies I’ll put it that yeah yeah and if you if you you know strategically Branch out into a few different areas of uh Services uh you can tailor kind of what your product servicing will be your marketing Packages Etc um you know with doing that what do you think you’re scaling on units is with those businesses to business if you’re going after like
10:03 small businesses Etc what you know if a business was listening to this what kind of orders would you be open to discussing and should they be reaching out if they had interest so basically uh let me just briefly tell you what type of a client that we’re going after so we’re going after uh the people who want to bring in an idea that they have but they don’t know where to go to um so this is something that is probably also known as merch uh so influencers small businesses um actually even larger uh 14
10:40 500 companies reached out to us so um we’re focusing uh on a medium to large volume products and so that would probably mean something like 500 to a th000 plus uh units depending on the product as well but uh because of our expertise in both Outsourcing and producing custommade products inhouse we have uh basically gone through all the steps and because we work directly we will work directly with businesses um I think that we can relate to questions and challenges that they are facing with both branding you
11:27 know um maybe choosing the type of product uh designing a custom product registering uh a trademark we’ve done that before okay and so curious with those um you know Imaging creation services that you offer is that something you do with AI do you have a graphic designer in house that you work with is it a combination like how do you customize um with your client’s input for you know whatever they want to design in that customized product okay very good question um so we recently launched our web AI designer
12:05 portal um so basically it uses mid Journey uh technology and it’s a text to image generator uh that you can use however when it comes to working directly uh with clients uh B2B clients uh then we are going to take a more tailored apprach so a graphic designer will work directly with them to make sure that everything is to their specification all the requirements are met uh maybe sometimes you know clients may not have the complete expertise and uh you know how sometimes certain files might be a lower resolution they don’t look good um
12:53 and so things like that test that out yep yep yep so we will work directly with them uh the means of communications that they prefer email phone call uh whatever it might be and just make it easy for them make the whole process as smooth as possible and make sure that they are very happy with the results so we get the returning business because we’ve noticed uh We’ve noticed that when we had uh Happy customers they were just coming back to us they didn’t want to go to anybody else and that’s the way it
13:27 should be really if I find a really good supplier that I never have to cons like worry myself about what I’m going to get from them because we’ve had clear communication they’ve delivered on time the product was good quality I don’t have any questions I will go back to them over and over again rather than having to try to find a new supplier every time so definitely uh repeat business is the way to go that being said do you find you you’re you’re getting a lot of referrals either on the
13:51 business to business or business to Consumer side and do you track anything like that do you know if you’re getting a lot of business from referrals yes that’s actually how everything was progressing uh in terms of businesses to business uh we did one project and then somebody else referred it to another person and it just you know spiraled like that so uh it made me it made me think about hey we actually should look into this Avenue because it’s just growing organically and probably when we start
14:23 advertising it’s going to um to get even uh big to grow right yes so referrals was um was actually something that I noticed um so the type of clients that we have are an I would say older Generation Um so they people that are used to working directly with their partners with their business partners people who actually do phone calls and they do enjoy being on the phone explaining everything person connection as opposed to the younger generation just they prefer not to speak to you at all yes yes why are you
15:03 calling me you should text me before you call and so yeah they take a fans to that I guess I’m only 35 I used to think that I’m young but uh sometimes I have to ask my son hey what does that mean what does this mean yeah you know sometimes it’s a curiosity I know what it means but I just want to hear you know how they interpret it they being a different generation a little younger um I hear you on that one I hear some things about in public and I’m like I’m old and that’s fine I’m a okay with
15:36 it but I do still prefer some text some email and if I see someone’s phoning me I think it’s important and I will answer because they are actually phoning me yeah yeah my son told me today dad you look drippy because I dressed up the and oh yeah yeah so I know what you mean but can you explain like the origin of the word drippy so know yeah yeah it says it it’s just like cool but in a trendy way okay gotcha cool in a trendy way all right yeah I guess that in in an older way I’m old I wouldn’t know um so we had
16:13 talked a little bit about some of you know kind of the pivot Points you realize you know strategically There’s an opportunity here let’s pivot what do you find like is your best strategy when you’re having that moment in your your your the light bulb goes on so to speak and you’re like let’s do this and you want to get some traction and you know feet to the ground and start running what do you do what’s your plan of attack when you like how do you start what do you need to document how do you
16:39 share out to your team your leadership get them involved like because that whole change management piece um I find working with clients is always a big frustration a challenge they don’t necessarily know how to tackle it and it sounds like in your business model you have pivoted your business model a few times and work expanded off your branch of services so that being said there’s lots of change management that goes into that how do you start as a leader when you come up with these ideas or you your
17:06 team has brought something to you that you want to implement thank you for a very interesting question um so you know any idea is a actually a product in a way so it needs testing it needs testing and it needs um a lot of quality assurance so I remember when my first uh idea in my head was born about going directly to Consumer so I wanted to I just had the theory but I need to test it in uh and make sure that my theory works and the math actually makes sense right so uh what happened was I noticed that when while I was
17:50 increasing my catalog of of different designs that we could uh print basically and produce so so the number of the orders were was growing also together so it was just a percentage so let’s call it an x uh and so let’s call the total number of catalog a y so if you increase your y it’s just a certain percentage is going to grow so what I did after that in order to test that because I need real you know tangible data right I automated the process of creating designs so instead of manually create the designs I went uh with a more lazy
18:33 route uh so I started purchasing efficient yes yes so um I I was value engineering my resources let’s call that that’s a great technique when you’re looking at starting a new product right so I started purchasing the designs from websites that allow to use their designs in commercial uh project applications yeah applications and um so I increased the number of my catalog from few hundred different uh variations to few thousand and so the sales 10x to hm how far can I push it okay um then I went even more efficient
19:20 route so I started creating designs with popular phrases and names in different styles different colors so I increased the catalog even further to few hundred, different variations so the sales 100x absolutely as they as you expected they would yes yes so so this is one of the testing so I I didn’t want to push it further because I kept myself with production limit limitations uh such as time only 24 hours in a day and only how many printers right like I only had I only had one at the time so um let’s
20:09 hold on with you know pushing that until we uh uh make our production more efficient so what we did was uh we started working three shifts instead of two that I was in um three shifts uh then we purchased the second machine then we tried to eliminate all the bottlenecks and yeah so um even a catalog of few hundred thousand uh different variations on Amazon I need to mention that was just capping our production and the Q4 of 2019 was a crazy Q4 but then something unexpected happened I don’t think a lot of people
20:57 expected it uh covid hit Co hit um uh so at the time we were in uh New York City the city shut down for five months you it was um um you can go outside basically right so you can’t go in anywhere yeah and so plus I couldn’t bring in uh the products uh cuz the borders were shut down so that put us in a very uh difficult situation and then we lost the number one uh platform uh Amazon um and so we couldn’t get it back uh long story really hard when she had taken off yeah yeah so Amazon because Amazon was you
21:49 know exploding like that it was bringing in 99% of the revenue and we focused only on Amazon and we basically dropped all the other PL so now basically we needed to start everything from stretch um so that was one of the first adversities one of the first challenges I guess um that I faced um so testing the idea was going well however I uh sometimes it’s worth uh going slower and not you know not full force just because if you run into a wall it’s just going to be very painful well and those challenges will always
22:31 come up right I think it’s having a really good team around you that can help brainstorm what you can do be creative in your solution so like you know run that printer 247 if it means adding a third shift you add a third shift if it means adding a fourth shift because you need shorter hours per shift you you just you become flexible right and you PIV it as needed for whatever you can do to get your product out there right and continue with those sales um with your businessto business pivot have you noticed any major ches or roadblocks
23:01 that have come up with that pivot or you know have has it been pretty smooth sailing and taking on like the white labeling mass production by mass production I mean working with small businesses or influencers to create content for them um for their merchandise like custom labels Etc so this is a um relatively new program I don’t want to share um too much but uh regarding the challenges that involved uh that are that could be involved in a businesses to business it’s a lot easier to handle I would say than something that you have
23:39 absolutely no control over uh by it being you know Mother Nature or you know geopolitical uh situations right so um so that’s what I’m noticing um it is a little bit easier um to run a business to business type of an agency company than a direct to Consumer brand when you have to deal with thousands of uh different people who have their own perspective their own because you have to remember everybody is coming into this from you know what whatever Journey they came from they don’t care if there was a a flood in South Florida or you
24:23 know covid or whatever it might be so however when you are working with uh a business owner who can relate to you a lot better and so I think mediating uh conflicts like that is uh is easier yeah and fair enough I think dealing with you know 10 cut clients customers with larger orders rather than dealing with a thousand individuals of course would be um a little bit easier however I you know I notice that on your website you guys have great customer support you can reach out for live chat as well so for that consumer um at the
25:03 end I’m sure you guys offer fantastic support there but then also you know if you’re dealing with someone doing a large scale order having your sales team be able to be there to support them um through you know the creation of their logo picking the right product and then you know figuring out what the best scale order is for them um all great services that you guys can provide to them any final thoughts or anything you’d like to share uh with the audience today on you know change management pivoting strategy for your business uh
25:28 before we sign off um maybe this is something that is related to everything in general not just running a business but um just don’t forget that life is basically like a video game with no rules I’m not saying that you should break rules or break the law no that’s not what I mean but um there’s always a way there’s always always a way just stay FOC Focus we live in such an amazing time we have all of these opportunities available probably if we brought somebody from uh you know the artist that I just
26:10 mentioned uh uh from the 1500s they would probably think that were magicians they would probably have a heart attack there’s this interesting uh interesting term by actually one of the partners that I worked with um they are a blogger their blog is called wait but why you should check it out it’s an amazing blog wait by um so they introduced this interesting uh concept called uh dpu dying Point Unit which means that if you bring somebody else from back in the back in the past they might have a heart attack and they might die so let’s let’s
26:50 say we bring somebody from 500 years ago they might die with a heart attack but for them if they used our time machine and brought somebody else to their time from 500 years ago that person wouldn’t die because they would probably say yeah Maps look differently and uh you know you have different laws and probably uh the fashion changed but for them to have somebody experience the dpu die Point Unit uh they would have to go back to Stone Age before you know uh writing was invented so what I’m trying to say is is
27:29 so this curve of dpu is is growing exponentially and probably we are going to experience uh something like that within the next 20 years that’s that’s what I genuinely think I think in 20 years we’re not going to recognize the world that we live in and it’s scary yes it’s scary however it’s enabling so many different things technology is the closest thing to real life Magic and you can utilize U uh AI you can use all of these beautiful tools that are available for not that much of money something
28:10 like this uh not not not even like this but less powerful than this used to be considered a supercomputer 20 years ago absolutely which took which took buildings not even rooms buildings and yeah yeah it’s just I I’m a cautious optimist so to come back to your question very long answer but uh there’s always a way don’t that don’t panic be excited every second is valuable and you can salvage anything like any situation can be salvaged anything I don’t care um you can get something positive out of anything so
28:53 just think of it as the percentile 99% negative but there 1% positive or whatever it could be just take that as a lesson and move forward don’t give up all right I appreciate that well thank you very much for joining us today it was great to learn about your journey uh your company’s Journey as well as some of the challenges that um you every business spes but um how you creatively um and strategically um identified ways to Pivot so I think that that’s a fantastic growth story right there thank you for your time
29:28 make progress getting done in business
Kai Nas’s story is a powerful reminder that every challenge holds a seed of opportunity. Embrace the unexpected, adapt, and keep pushing forward—like Kai, you might just turn obstacles into your biggest triumphs. Stay tuned for more inspiring tales and practical tips on the “Getting Done in Business” podcast! Watch the previous episode if you haven’t got a chance before!
