Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Curtis.
Hi Matt, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My small business story begins as most do not, at a pool party in Pensacola during Pride weekend over Memorial Day weekend in 2019. My friends and I were having a fun discussion when we kept getting interrupted by a younger guy who kept clacking this bamboo fan and posing. As annoyed as I was, I began to look around and see others with these fans and so I began to look more closely at the fans. They were bright, colorful, mostly with crude humor, and, most importantly to the story, there were only about two to three brand names on them. With so few major competitors, there was an opportunity for me to enter the market with a new offering, and with my fourteen years of sales and marketing experience at the world’s largest beauty company, inspiration struck, and thus, the Houston Fan Club was born.
I left Pensacola the next morning and flew back to Houston and did a little more (sober) thinking about the business. Bamboo hand fans made sense in a city like Houston, which is equally patio friendly and unbearably hot in the summer. I also thought about the target customer: gay boys, gay men and women, straight women and men at music festivals, and even bachelorette parties since many weddings are outdoor. In my full-time job as the head of business development for the leading beauty company in the world, I have fourteen years of sales and marketing experience and I also wanted to use my expertise to help other LGBT youth who were smart enough, but may not be afforded the same business opportunities as I have been over my career. I could use The Houston Fan Club as a way to teach others who were looking to learn business skills these skills through the company in exchange for their help in getting the word out for me. As soon as I landed, I made a beeline for Staples in Sawyer Heights by my house and bought a laptop capable of doing design work and a subscription to Adobe Illustrator. I’ll admit, I had absolutely no idea how to use Illustrator or really much about creative design, and my first designs from the template the Chinese manufacturer that I found provided me, were rather rough. However, I was so excited about learning the new skill and using my bottled up creativity, that I worked through the evening and wound up with twelve fan designs for my debut collection, and at midnight, I sent them to China for manufacturing.
With the fans in production, I then enlisted the help of my friend, Javier, who had recently built a website for his job at the Houston Fire Museum. He built the website and I taught him how to use descriptors for the items that would get picked up on SEO and to use alt-tags with the images of the products to be picked up on google images. The fans arrived the day before Houston Pride in 2019 and I sent a group of my “fans” out with the Houston Fan Club fans in their pockets with a sales pitch “Wow you’re hot.. you should stay cool with a Houston Fan Club fan… they are only $19.95 today only” and the opportunity to keep every penny for the evening’s festivities.
I realized pretty quickly that my initial designs- while selling okay -weren’t going to win any graphic design awards, so on July 1st, I began working on another twelve fans that would be a bit more high brow for the discerning fan consumer. I leaned in towards sassy fans, such as our F Off Fan, in memory of the former F Bar, now ReBar, on Tuam, and Go Away and tried to expand my fan base, pun intended, towards women with fans like Woke Up Like This. In the fall of that year, I decided to change my business name to The Gay Fan Club to help reach a broader market outside of Houston and that $14.99 domain purchase was a very smart decision. Over 1,000 people a month, mostly women and gay men, google gay fan after a night out at a gay bar where they undoubtedly came across some annoying boy clacking his fan. The Gay Fan Club lost money at the end of 2019, but I was pleased with the creativity I had put into the business and the opportunity I had to help teach others about sales and marketing. I was also learning a ton myself in regards to design, what consumers want (colorful rainbow fans, fans with sassy phrases, and thoughtfully designed fans), as well as advertising on social media, google, and how to increase organic ranking. 2020 obviously wasn’t a great year for the new Fan Club as most customers have air conditioning while sitting at home, however, I kept working to design new fans and continued putting money into paid advertising and surprisingly sales weren’t as bad as I expected. The fans could also be used in selfies as a clothing accessory and most people had plenty of time for selfies in April and May.
In 2021, I had finally figured out what the customers really wanted and my design skills had improved dramatically. I released 30 new fan designs and I began selling wholesale to gay businesses across the country. 2021 was the first year I actually made a small profit, which while it wasn’t going to pay my rent, made me incredibly proud. As of today, The Gay Fan Club website gets over 2,500 visitors a month from all over the country, and with 30 new designs, we are on track to expand our B2B retail operations to another 15 markets this year. While I’m proud of what I have accomplished, I am most proud and humbled when I am walking through Montrose or while visiting another city like Chicago, and I see one of my designs helping someone stay cool.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Any business that says that the road was smooth the entire way is delusional. Every business has challenges and I had plenty in the first two years and even now. For starters, I am a one-man band most months of the year. I am the CEO, the lead designer, the website developer, the head of social media, and on weekends, the shipping clerk. Time has always been my biggest challenge as I travel typically four days a week for my other job, so I had to figure out a way to ship out orders during the week. I’ve also struggled with keeping up with the constantly changing rules and best practices on google and social media networks to keep my engagement up. In 2020, I struggled with how to sell fans in a world without nightclubs, music festivals, and pride parades. I’ve learned where there is a will, there is a way to overcome anything if you put your mind and your heart into it.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
The job that pays the bills
VP | US Business Development at SkinCeuticals, Active Cosmetics Division of L’Oréal USA
In 2008, I was hired as the Houston-East Account Executive for SkinCeuticals, a brand of medically dispensed skincare products focused around our hero product C E Ferulic. For the next seven years, I grew the Houston market (eventually I was the rep for all of Houston) from 40 dermatology and plastic surgery practices that carried the brand to 218 locations across the city. In 2015, I was asked to build the SkinCeuticals Business Development program to grow our business interests. SkinCeuticals China had recently opened retail stores in malls and paid doctors to work in these stores performing Botox and other treatments and the company had the same plans to do so in the U.S. Due to my strong relationships with my Houston customers, I realized that I could engineer a program that would take the Chinese concept of retail-focused medicine, and develop a way for doctors, who are not exactly savvy retailers, on the whole, to benefit from our partnership. So, in 2015, the first SkinCeuticals Advanced Clinical Spa Flagship location opened in Lafayette, LA. In exchange for brand exclusivity, I would invest roughly $20,000 into their waiting area to create a retail focused setting, and provide them L’Oreal’s expertise in business and marketing, to create a new stream of revenue for them through retail. Today, there are 140 SkinCeuticals locations nationally including four in Houston alone. In 2019, I began working on our 2.0 version of the flagship concept, with the goal of making medical aesthetics more accessible to the beauty customer who might shop at Sephora and might be interested in stepping up his or her game, but was likely unsure where to start. So after months of work with my marketing counterpart, we developed the SkinCeuticals SkinLab concept, which is a roughly 2,000 square foot medical aesthetics space devoted to skincare and makeup retail in the front of the store, and treatment rooms offering signature facials, injectables, and body contouring in the back. I partnered with our flagship partners to open these locations as a method to attract new patients to their office and generate brand awareness in a highly desirable retail location in a money-making business that would continue to grow. We launched the SkinLab with the dual openings of Napa Valley and Stamford, CT in February of 2020 (not the best time to launch a new concept) and continued in 2020 with our Houston location, SkinLab at West Ave in partnership with Forrest Roth in May of that year and in Palm Desert, CA in December. Today, we have nine locations in key markets such as New York City, Miami, Charleston, Scottsdale, and Grand Rapids, with five more that I am opening this year in LA, Denver, and other markets.
I’m most proud of having convinced L’Oreal in 2015 that investing in small businesses across the country is a way to build loyalty, awareness, and revenue and for helping those doctors become more successful with my concepts. I love going into a city and seeing a location that I opened in 2017 have a line of customers shopping their retail display where none existed before. I think what set’s me apart is my philosophy of ready, shoot, aim. A lot of people spend countless hours trying to calculate the risks and the right way to go about things. I dream it, I do it, and I adjust each time I do it again until it’s right.
The man with a fan job
President, The Gay Fan Club
I started Houston Fan Club, now, The Gay Fan Club, as a side hobby in 2019. I specialize in the design and creation of bamboo hand fans that keep the end-user cool and allow the person to stand out in photos or at parties with their colorful designs and (often annoying) clacking noises they make when opened. I am a one-man show at The Gay Fan Club. I design the fans, process orders, ship packages, manage the social media channels, work on the website and SEO, and sell to businesses across the United States. These fans, which originated in Japan, and have become popular again in the last five years, are designed to help you stay cool on hot dance floors, on Sunday Funday patios, and they are popular with gay men and women which are too valuable offices especially when you consider over half of my sales are e-commerce purchases. I am most proud when I see someone that I have never met at a bar or walking down the street holding one of my designs in their hand and smiling for a photo or showing it off to their friends. Those hours of creativity that I probably put into that fan pay off with the smiles and satisfaction of my satisfied customers. I think what sets me apart from other fan companies is that I try to take a more balanced approach to my designs. Most of my competitors design these low-brow fans with generic gay slang. I prefer to create fans that are more appealing to the eye and attract as many women as men. From a personal standpoint, I think what sets me out is that I am a hustler. I am always up for a challenge and I practice until it’s perfect.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Feeling like my life was well lived is what is most important to me as I get older. I like to challenge myself daily and push myself to keep learning and keep striving to perfect my craft. I work hard and I play hard and if I’m not exhausted at the end of the day, I didn’t do it right. People who stop learning start dying and I am here to live for a long long time. I enjoy my friends and my family too much.
Pricing:
- $19.95 for most fans
Contact Info:
- Email: sales@thegayfanclub.com
- Website: www.thegayfanclub.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/thegayfanclub_
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegayfanclub
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegayfanclub
