Poorly sewn
Sharing about her startup process, Ms. My Dinh (Ninh Kieu district, Can Tho city) said that at first, with only a borrowed sewing machine, she practiced sewing stuffed animals and making photo accessories for her husband. However, because the sewing was too bad to use for taking photos, her husband bought the stuffed animal for 20 thousand VND to support her.
At this time, the 9x girl began to have faith in starting a business by sewing “ugly and strange” stuffed animals. In the early days, Ms. Dinh’s fanpage only had 10 followers, she had to text each friend to ask for orders and sew gifts.
With her limitless creativity, Ms. Dinh chose a bold direction, designing stuffed animals with unique shapes. The details of the head, eyes, hands, feet… are unusual, asymmetrical, and the colors are random and do not follow any rules.
In particular, she also named each stuffed animal with funny and unique names such as: back pain cat, armpit dinosaur, onion alien, little Thinh wearing a hat, cow fish, bald fairy, etc., creating uniqueness and difference in the market.
“I allow myself to be creative without following any established path. Each product takes from a few days to a week to complete. All stuffed animals are hand-washed and sun-dried before being sold to minimize fabric dust,” said Ms. Dinh.
In particular, the slogans containing messages describing the products of this tailor shop also make many young people excited, such as: "the seams are meticulously bad" or "you can order whatever you want, and I will sew whatever you want"...
From the content conveyed with a bit of humor, wit, along with unique stuffed animal products, young people gradually came to Ms. Dinh's fanpage as a place to heal and relax.
As a regular customer of My Dinh tailor shop, Ms. Nguyen Chi Mai excitedly shared: "The stuffed animals of the shop are beautiful in their ugliness, cute in their ugliness, but the most important thing is the positive energy conveyed when following My Dinh's fanpage."
Earn more than 1 billion VND/year
Currently, Ms. Dinh's fanpage has more than 130 thousand followers, and her Tiktok channel has millions of likes... Thanks to that, orders also come to the "ugly and strange" stuffed animal brand of the 9x girl without having to be invited.
To date, Ms. Dinh has made thousands of stuffed animal products with many different designs, styles and sizes. In particular, a customer ordered a baby Dragon Ly with a length of more than 4m, weighing nearly 8kg, which was hand-sewn by Ms. Dinh and sold for 12 million VND, attracting the attention of the online community.
One of Dinh’s successes was designing a stuffed animal of the character “Mother Min” for the launch of the novel “The Land of Endless Wonders” by artist Jun Pham. All proceeds from the sale of the stuffed animal were donated by Jun Pham to the Heartbeat Vietnam program to support heart surgery for children in difficult circumstances.
Looking back on her entrepreneurial journey, after much effort and perseverance with the ugly stuffed animal brand, Ms. Dinh earned more than 1 billion VND/year.
“I am who I am today thanks to everyone’s kindness. I believe that lovely things in this world will never disappear, and I will never stop trying,” Dinh happily said.
