On my left arm when I sleep, when I work and even as I’m writing this at the moment, I wear a cheap watch. It boasts a brown fake leather strap with some form of a metal clip. The face is circled with a gold colored metal with a mechanism on the outward-side to change the time and date. The face itself has the Roman numerals from 9-3 (IX,X,XI,XII,I,II,III) with the other numbers market with a simple strip. Blue hands tick around the face, telling me that it’s getting closer and closer to bedtime. (I still have to make my lunch.)
This is the third watch I’ve been through. One just stopped working and the other one had its strap break at work. So on my left wrist right now I wear my 3rd cheap and clunky $3 watch from China. I have 17 more of them sitting in a tub, in my garage waiting until my current one breaks, and I require their services.
It would have been late 2017 and early 2018. I thought to my self, “People are always buying cheap stuff from China and selling it here. Why can’t I just do that?” So that’s exactly what I did. It took me a few months to set up, I watched multiple videos on Youtube and read countless articles, even attended webinars all based around reselling cheap goods from China. I registered a business with the all of the legal entities required, built up a website sourced the products talking to multiple different suppliers and after a broken leg in November gave me a lot of time to wallow in my crippled sadness and smash through a lot of the admin side of things, early December I was done. The product arrived and I started advertising straight away. All the way up until Christmas. And then I advertised some boxing day sales. Then I advertised some New Years Sales! I cut my price by nearly 50% and by the end of it, I was just trying to make back what I lost. No one bought the watches. (Good thing I only had a small amount of stock.)
By the end of it, I was left with a failed business with no sales and a few hundred dollars down. I think it totaled around $600 by the end of it so all and all, not the biggest loss that could have been made. I moved on to my next thing, which involved taking a course in online business and entrepreneurship but that’s a story for another time. I was left with 20 units of stock. So no I wear them. I don’t wear them to remind me of my failure. I wear them to remind me of the lessons I learned and most importantly, I wear them as a testament to my journey.
When I look down and see my watch, I don’t see some cheap and clunky $3 Watch from China. What I see is a fraction in time where I decided, I was going to do something. I was going to make a business. I liaised with suppliers, I built a website, I invested my money and I ran advertisements. I learned how to write countless spreadsheets and emails. I shipped in some product and set up a business. When I look down at my watch, I see that there was a time in my life when I was completely committed to an idea and followed through with it. Regardless of the outcome, I decided to write my own history and improve my self.
That is why I wear a cheap and clunky $3 watch from China.
GYST 