401 | Going From 20 to 120 Wholesale Accounts with Carley Hussain, Parcel Island

·29 min·2 clips

Carly Hussain just hit 120 wholesale accounts after starting with only 20.

This episode features host Katie Hunt interviewing Carley Hussain, founder of the Philadelphia-based gift and stationery brand Parcel Island. Carley is an alum of Hunt's Paper Camp coaching program and has grown her wholesale accounts from 20 to over 120 while working a full-time job. The conversation centers on the practical strategies behind this rapid business growth. Carley details how automating her cold pitch outreach using the Gmail plugin Streak was a critical step, allowing her to track emails and tailor follow-ups. She credits joining the wholesale platform Faire with providing significant organic growth for her business. Carley emphasizes the importance of defining a unique brand voice to make marketing templates feel personal and effective. She manages her dual workload using the project management tool Asana to organize tasks for both her corporate job and her business. A major challenge she identifies is managing inventory and maintaining quick turnaround times for wholesale orders. Carley explains that shifting to planned, batched product launches a few times a year, rather than constant retail-style releases, created a more sustainable workflow. She reveals that locally-inspired designs, particularly for the Philadelphia area, have become one of her best-performing categories. About 30% of her wholesale accounts are in the local tri-state region, and these accounts drive roughly 80% of her business revenue. Carley finds that sharing her hobby of skateboarding provides a creative outlet completely separate from her work. She plans to expand her product line by creating designs inspired by cities she travels to, starting with an upcoming trip to Chicago. Her key advice is to actively reach out to local business and creative communities, as a simple conversation led a former co-worker to invite her to her first major trade show, New York Now. The tone is educational and conversational, focused on sharing actionable business tactics and celebrating a community member's success. This episode is ideal for product-based entrepreneurs, especially in the gift and stationery space, who are looking for concrete steps to grow their wholesale presence efficiently. Listeners seeking highly theoretical business advice or industry-agnostic strategies may find the niche focus less applicable.

As heard by us

A plainspoken wholesale growth story that stays close to process, outreach, and day-to-day pressure.

Carly Hussain's Parcel Island story keeps the process visible. It follows a gift and stationery business from 20 wholesale accounts to more than 120 stores, even while she was holding down a full-time job.

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Why you'd press play

A practical wholesale growth story for a product founder working full time.

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