Meet Sydney Williams

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sydney Williams.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
We are Twobrokecollegestudents; we meet in Miami, Florida, as college roommates our freshman year of college. Both Kayla and I didn’t grow up wealthy by long shot (hence Twobrokecollegestudents) and we wanted pursue financial freedom in an ethical way. We have love for beauty and the environment and we decided we wanted to combust this together by making an eco-friendly beauty company. We started by just selling eyelashes and purses and now we have five vendors and we sell everything from organic skincare to accessories. We first started selling products on campus and the COVID hit and now we operate completely online with a few popup shops here and there. We curated the best products for our customers at affordable price and we hand make most of products or they are hand-made by local vendor who are also eco-friendly. We believe we rise together and that is why we launched our vendor program to have other businesses showing there work on our platform

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We started this business with no money so we use our college refunds to fund the business and we didn’t make any money in the first three months, which was very devastating because we spent the money we could used for food or books on the business, so after four month we decided to launch our vendor program which made the business to pick a little because local business selling on our site drove in traffic. But still not enough to keep website cost and new products and right after this happen like three weeks later COVID hit which we did not even expect, well nobody expected and we did not know better way to our to get our names out but by word of mouth, so honestly we gave up on the business for a month or so because we both had to leave Miami to go to our home towns but then we discovered Facebook ads and found a way to vamp of marketing on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Tik Tok and we were able to drive up our views and customers in about two months and we restarted our brand with all new packaging and new marketing techniques and we have been going up from there.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We both are college students Kayla is prelaw major and Sydney is a performing arts major with minor fashion design. Kayla runs all the marketing amongst the social media and she designs the website as well as Accessories. Sydney runs the finances and the skincare as well as the vendor program. I feel like we don’t specialize in anything and that is what sets us apart from others we want to me to go to beauty shop for every product we also want to be ethical and eco-friendly which we don’t see as much in the beauty industry. We are known for our dynamic colors and products and keeping up with the latest trends as well as be an honest company who doesn’t give our customers any quality but the best.

Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
Honestly mentors have been around those people who own businesses like our family members or friends and they basically gave us the dos and don’t of the industry and business in general. We also spent a lot of time on YouTube and other information on site to figure out what works for a bigger businesses.

Contact Info:

• Email: Twobrokecollegestudents@yahoo.com
• Website: www.2brokecollegestudents.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/twobrokecollegestudents_?igshid=1n2scjl76i1e
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/2brokecs?s=21
• Other: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeBDUrg7/

Image Credits
Joe Mullins