With internship season in full swing, we’re spotlighting Eileen Kang’s story, who not only excels as an intern at Intuit Mailchimp but also thrives as an entrepreneur. Operating from her dorm room, Eileen designs and handcrafts unique jewelry pieces for her small business, Kinaesthetics Studio. Her journey from a hobbyist to a business owner reflects her passion for both art and entrepreneurship.
Read on to explore how Eileen manages to balance her internship with running a successful small business, and how her experiences at Intuit Mailchimp have influenced her entrepreneurial journey.
Hi, Eileen! Please introduce yourself, your side hustle, and what inspired you to start it.
My name is Eileen Kang, an Intuit Mailchimp Product Manager intern, and I’m the artist/marketer/businesswoman/everything else behind Kinaesthetics Studio, my small jewelry business. I design and make sterling silver jewelry by hand out of my dorm at school, and primarily sell my work at art and flea markets on campus. Kinaesthetics Studio was born out of my desire for high-quality jewelry in simple, elegant, and fun styles.
I started the business by researching jewelry making and metalsmithing, and sourcing the materials needed to create. At first, I was making pieces for myself, creating what I wanted to wear, but I quickly found myself drowning in piles of jewelry I’d made. I also had a lot of requests from friends to share my work. With the demand, the natural next step was to start selling my work.
How has having a side hustle influenced your understanding of running a small business and entrepreneurship?
Over the years, I’ve experimented with different ways of doing so, from selling online to hosting in-person pop-up shops and building my own website. Almost all the capital I’ve generated from sales is reinvested into the business, which has allowed me to scale up my techniques and explore more involved ways of making jewelry.
Working on Kinaesthetics Studio has made me realize just how unique each small business is. Every small business was born for a different reason and each owner has their own aspirations, which is an incredibly helpful context for me as an Intuit Mailchimp Product Manager intern.
It’s also taught me the sheer amount of skills a small business owner has to learn, manage, and master to achieve their goals. Not only do you have to create an excellent, unique product, you also have to work on marketing and keep track of finances to make sure everything’s running smoothly. It’s not something that can be done without a lot of passion.
What are some challenges you’ve faced since starting your business? How do you overcome them?
The biggest challenge I face with my business is marketing and brand recognition. I don’t use most social media platforms for personal reasons, so I have to give up an incredibly powerful marketing tool. A few months ago, I built a website for Kinaesthetics Studio that primarily serves as an online shop, but it was also a huge step in establishing a brand identity through design.
Since coming to Intuit, I’ve been playing around with Mailchimp products for my business and I’m realizing how much I’ve been missing out on with email/SMS marketing! Currently, my work is only really known on the Claremont Colleges’ campuses, but email marketing/CRM and my new website have a ton of potential to grow an online presence that isn’t just anchored locally. But for now, my primary focus is on making jewelry for my college community during my free time.
Another hurdle I faced, and still sometimes struggle with, was pricing my work. There are formulas floating around on how to price handmade jewelry, but I was shocked at the suggested prices they were spitting out. The biggest struggle with pricing is balancing your talent, time’s worth, the price your customers are willing to pay, and the competition.
Especially with fast-fashion’s availability and affordability, coupled with college student’s general desire for cheap and constant consumption, it feels difficult to convince myself that a pair of earrings I made by hand with sterling silver is worth three times as much as a mass-produced pair made of alloy. I’ve overcome this by testing various price points and seeing which hits the sweet spot of selling.
What’s been your proudest moment in operating Kinaesthetics Studio so far?
My college community is close and tight-knit. As such, I’ll often be walking around campus and seeing someone wearing a pair of earrings or a necklace I made for them. That’s my favorite thing about running this business—seeing the people around me thoroughly enjoy my jewelry the way it’s designed to be enjoyed: in everyday life.
Once I was on an Amtrak heading back to school from winter break, and ran into some other 5C students. I immediately recognized two of them; one had green hair and the other had red hair. Just a few months earlier, I’d met them while working at a flea market and remembered vividly how they’d found two pairs of earrings, one green and one red, that matched their respective vibrant hair colors. When I saw them on the train, they were both wearing those earrings. It was an incredible moment.
What’s next?
Once I get back to school and I’m reunited with my tools and community, I want to start collecting emails from customers to send email campaigns and updates. In terms of physical products, I’m very excited to begin experimenting with lost wax silver casting and hope to one day invest in my own home casting setup.
But, Kinaesthetics Studio, more than anything, is a creative outlet for me. I get to make and experiment with metals and jewelry, design websites, create marketing content, and engineer custom parts of my website. For the foreseeable future, I’ll probably maintain this small, sustainable level we’re currently operating at. I hope to continue this throughout my life, but maybe one day I’ll go all in and lean into it full time.