She Started a Jewelry Brand with $5,000 After College. Now it Does $20M in Sales a Year.
Adriana Carrig made bracelets for her friends with uplifting messages in college. The idea stuck and she ran with it post-grad. Today, her brand, Little Words Project, has done collabs with brands like Barbie, and been worn by celebs like Taylor Swift, is sold in 900+ stores including 12 of their own, and does $20M in annual sales.
LWP was 100% self-funded and bootstrapped for the first 10 years. Adriana initially invested $5,000 which mainly went into inventory and legal fees. From day one, Adriana was intentional about building her business to be more of a marketing company than a jewelry brand, leveraging limited-edition releases, collaborations and their own unique value proposition to grow the brand.
The bracelets all have empowering messages. The idea is that you will wear your bracelet with the message for as long as you need it, then you pass it onto someone else who could use the boost. The hook? Each bracelet has a custom code that can be registered online so that you can track and see where and how your bracelet has impacted others as it moves. This serves as a super unique reason for customers to shop and provides automatic word of mouth marketing.
LWP has done hundreds of amazing partnerships—from bracelet making activations at events like the Nike Women’s Summit and Camp Poosh, to limited edition bracelets with Dunkin Donuts to celebrate National Coffee Day for their rewards members, to NYSYNC gifting an LWP bracelet to Taylor Swift at the VMAs. Swipe on to see Adriana’s tips on building out incredible, impactful brand partnerships.
Adriana’s partnerships tips:
Score brand partnerships by sharing your authenticity. Get into your story and your background.
Align on goals. What will success look like for this partner? Is this something we can achieve?
Understand everyone’s value. Typically LWP charges brands for their product and participation, but early on LWP paid to work with dream brands and Adriana still says it was a great decision.
Eight years into the business LWP opened their first flagship store. They’d figured out online and built out a wholesale story that clicked, but wanted to scale their IRL impact for their community. Fast forward two years and they’ve grown to 12 shops.
After building LWP for ten years, we asked Adriana how she’s still as passionate as she was on day one.
“Don't focus on the ways that it's [your business] maybe not Working focus on the ways that it is. when you look at that stuf and you double down into all the things that work, the more you do that The more you're too inundated by the positive that like the negative doesn't penetrate.”
