In this episode, I interview Derek Miller, founder/owner of Genius Lab Gear (geniuslabgear.com). We talk about his journey from PhD to entrepreneurship while working a full-time job in materials science, the process of designing and launching products such as the Lab Coat Project, and slowly building a lifestyle business on your own terms.
About Derek Miller and Founding Genius Lab Gear
BT: This is the founder of Genius Lab Gear, Derek Miller, and I’m really excited to have him with us because I’ve been following him for a while. I really wanted to interview him and just kind of ask him about his trajectory of Genius Lab Gear, the business growth, and being a scientist and also an entrepreneur. Could you please introduce yourself and Genius Lab Gear?
DM: My name is Derek Miller (DM). I founded Genius Lab Gear in 2018, and the whole goal of what I wanna do was solve problems to help make lab work easier. I just started with a few little lab hacks that I found in the lab that I was working in. And then I started 3D printing some stuff to solve that. And then it went from there that I found more problems to solve and made products for those, and I made a website. And then, you know, fast forward 5 or 6 years, and here we are. One of my first products was the Pocket Scientist and its variations.
I mostly started when I was doing lab work for my first job, after my PhD, and that’s when I had some ideas to improve our workflows in our lab there. And so I started fiddling around with some stuff, and started prototyping it.
The motivation for why I wanted to do it came down to having something that I was passionate about just solving problems. I always loved product design. And I kinda did that for my job already, so that was great. But I would just see things, and I’d be like, “Oh, I could probably make something that would do better than what we’re using right now.”
My girlfriend at the time (now wife) was in medical school and I knew she was gonna have to move in 2 years. And then another move 2 years after that, and then going to residency, and then probably move another 3 years after that. It’s gonna be really hard to keep this job if I’m going to move or I’ll have to make a hard decision if I’m gonna stay and go long distance for a while.
And so, you know, in the back of my mind, I thought, “It’d be great if I could just make some income so that if I do have to move, I can at least pay my expenses and move with her. We can stay together, not be long distance, and I can at least cover my expenses for some gap until I find another job in that new area.” That was all I wanted to do at first. Make cool stuff and make sure I had enough income so that I could move with her.
And then from there, you know, things picked up and it got going, growing again, and finding new problems to solve.
BT: That’s something that I also really resonate with as well. And I also think that’s why, the small business route is kind of really appealing to me and potentially a lot of graduate students or others in the STEM field who also have these similar issues of the 2-body problem, and not being tied to one place or one company.
On Growing Genius Lab Gear Slowly
BT: In the past couple of years, you (Genius Lab Gear) have really grown a lot. Do you remember when that turning point was?
DM: I would say that there wasn’t a turning point. I was actually totally fine with my job. And it got better and better as the years went on. And so I didn’t have this moment where I was like, “I’m jumping ship. I’m getting out of here. Like, I gotta make this work. Let’s 10x this business.” That never really happened.
I’ll spend as much time as I can after work on weekends and nights when I can, and I’m gonna put in the work to grow this over time. I remember the 1st year that I made a 5 figure profit. This is what I really wanted. I can pay some expenses with this. And then the next year, it would double, and then the next year, it would double.
So it was very slow, I mean, I guess doubling feels fast, but still small numbers compared to most businesses. Now it’s getting closer and closer and closer to, like, having the resources to do more. And so, that was it was like, which product can I introduce that will give me more recent sources to introduce the next product?
It was just a very slow and steady growth, which is not normally what you hear when you hear about, you know, start up culture where they grow to $1,000,000,000 in 2 years, and they exit and burn everybody out along the way. It was very much a “Let’s just do what I can and do the best that I can in the time I have without working myself to death.” That’s kind of the goal.
There’s another subculture of people doing what they would call lifestyle businesses, which is to grow it slowly as well as you can, streamline things, get the processes tuned in, and focus on what you’re really good at and get help for all the other things.
The Logistics of a Product-Based Small Business
BT: With Genius Lab Gear right now, is it still just mostly you, or do you have contractors and things like that? How big is the operation right now?
DM: It’s probably much smaller than people realize, especially when I get emails from people, and then I reply to them and then they say, oh, I didn’t respect a response from the CEO within 10 minutes. I don’t I don’t really call myself that. But right now, I am the only full time employee, and I have 5 part time assistants. And total, they’re, like, 80 hours a week between all 5 of them. And then I hired out eventually for accounting and taxes, and that was a huge help.
And then last year, I made the move to stop shipping all my orders myself and keeping all of the inventory in our basement or what used to be our closet of our 2 bedroom apartment. And now I have a warehouse that stores everything for me, and they ship everything.
And so that the turning point was maybe 2022 in November, December. I would come home. I would get off work, and I would have to pack and ship 20 or 30 orders a day during the holidays in some cases. And that was really stressful. It took a lot of time. And so I was like, I have to get help on this.
I shipped all my own orders for 3 or 4 years, and it wasn’t that hard. And anybody can do that from home with a printer and a label printer and some packaging off Amazon. So it’s pretty easy to get started. The first products were so small. It was easy to do out of a closet.
And then when I knew that the lab coats were coming, I knew I was like, I you know, this might be a year away, but I have to get somebody set up. Yeah. So my first question to them was “Do you do apparel, and can you handle returns?”
The Origin Story of the Lab Coat Project
BT: Can you share more about what the Lab Coat Project is, how you came up with it and the progression of it in the past few years?
DM: I would say I always wanted to make better lab coats. But again, for anybody listening who has a really big problem in mind that they wanna solve, sometimes you need to solve a smaller problem before you can really tackle the big one. And I would not have had the resources or the audience or the email list to do this well, you know, when I really started.
And so but once I got some other products going and it was generating some income that I could use and getting some customers and winning some, you know, brand loyalty, then I was like, okay. Maybe it’s time to finally approach this.
And, I remember it was 4 years ago because it was the summer of COVID, and I was driving home. It might have been Thanksgiving of COVID, and I was driving home to my parents’ house because I didn’t wanna fly, and it was such a long drive. And so I had a lot of thinking time, and I was like, “Maybe I should really do this lab coat, but I don’t know anything about designing lab coats is the problem.” And so that’s when I decided that if I got enough data, it would probably make the process a lot easier.
And so I decided just on the fly that probably a 1,000 data points is probably about right to really nail down the problems and even the fit and things. And so that’s when I just launched the survey. You know, that wasn’t a commitment and it cost me any money.
I just posted about it in a few places, asked some friends to repost it, and I said if we get a 1,000 responses, we’ll start prototyping something. And so, the reason the Lab Coat product took so long was because it took about a year, maybe 14 months to get a 1,000 responses. So it wasn’t fast by any means. But I actually cheated, and I started prototyping something before then because I was so excited about it.
Prototyping and Testing Process for the Lab Coat Project
DM: From the prototyping, it took a year, and I found a little seamstress that was referred by a friend, and I bought a lab coat online that was the closest I could find to what I wanted. And then we started just sewing on new pockets or making adjustments to it, things like that. And that whole process was less than $1,000 for all of that. And then, by that time, I had a little more steam, a little more knowledge of manufacturing and supply chain, and I was able to find a manufacturer, just to make samples. And then, after the after I really thought the design was nailed down.
I also I’d say, to back up one step, when I got the survey data, it was way better than I thought. It was much more detailed, and people really spilled out exactly what was wrong. And to a point where it was a much bigger problem than I actually thought it was. It lit a fire under me. Like, this isn’t just about adding an extra pocket. This is about making people feel good when they go into work. And I was also thinking, I’m one scientist. I go in the lab. I can make, you know, a small difference in my field. But, if I can make thousands of scientists feel 10% better every day in while they work, then oh my gosh, what if everybody did better science and liked it a lot better? Wouldn’t that make a big impact on the world? And so, that’s when I really got going on it, and I started putting real resources into it.
And I got other people involved. I recruited some beta testers to test out the 30 lab coats, of which you were one of them. So thank you for doing that. And that was extremely important because it’s a big investment to get lab coats made for production. And I would not have felt comfortable spending that amount of money without having, like, at least a dozen people. You know, we got 30 luckily, but with at least a dozen people saying that it was good, you know, that we should go forward. My biggest fear was saying it out to all the beta testers and then just saying, like, that’s actually not that good.
And so once we got the beta testers confirmed, almost everybody said it was the best lab coat they had ever worn. And so then I decided, okay. Now it’s time to launch a preorder because, again, we can’t afford to run. It was about $50,000 to order the minimum order of lab coats, of which is a 1,000 of each men’s and women’s. That would’ve been the most amount of the biggest amount of money I’ve spent in one go on the business so far.
And so, you know, I put that number out there and I said, “if we can raise half of this in the preorder, then then we’ll go for it. And we launched preorder. I had to do a big marketing campaign, which I don’t really like doing marketing, but I did it, and we got enough attention. A lot of media attention got on some big podcasts for that and got some good news articles written about it, and got a lot of people really excited about it.
The goal was 600 lab coats. We got to 800 by the time the preorder closed, and that was enough to fund a good chunk of the manufacturing run. And then it took another 6 months to actually get them made and manufactured and shipped to us and ready to ship out.
It was really a group effort. I call it a crowdsourced design, and then we also crowdfunded it. And so it was a bunch of scientists banding together to make something unique, and that’s why I was just so excited about it. And that’s where I think is, like, what I wanna do more of with the future of the business.
Creating Your Business to Fit Your Life
BT: So are you already on search for your next idea, or what else do you want to create with GeniusLab Gear or to create in your life with GeniusLab Gear?
DM: This year I had to really take a break from launching new products. That was basically, every year, I was trying to launch 2 or 3 new products, and it takes a lot of work. And this year, I realized that I am doing 2, I was doing almost all the work in the whole business, you know, every single little thing, and I can’t do what I’m good at anymore, which is, I think, launching the products, until I get help doing all the other stuff.
I’m really focusing on putting the systems in place and the process flows and the workflows and getting help on. I’ve got help on customer service for the first time, a lot of other things. And then what I what I really want is if I can get a lot of that stuff, I call it,, operationalized, and have a really good team to manage that, then my vision for myself in this business is that I focus entirely on, product design and not just design, but, like, customer engagement that goes with that design.
Because I don’t wanna design something on my own, and just be like, ta da. Here it is. It’s so fun to show people the first try and then go get 3 or 4 people who would use it and get their feedback, and then do it again and do it again. And you come up with such a better product, and it solves the problems usually more elegantly. And you also have more confidence to spend the money to go do it.
And so I would love to just, like, go visit labs, have video calls with people, talk to them about, like, what are your problems, what are you running into, and then hopefully see, like, themes of where people really need these problems solved. And then just make that my, like, my mission to, like, design the products collaboratively with other people.
And then, once they’re up and launched, then, you know, then I get the rest of the team to help support that, and then I can move on to the next one. And so what that looks like, I think right now, lab coats is the biggest way that we can make a difference.
I’ve got, like, 10 more pocket cards I wanna launch and a bunch more, like, word magnet themes, but those will take time too. And I think the lab coats is really where we can make the biggest difference.
So I think, more fits, more colors, and more, material types because a lot of people can’t buy our lab coat because this one’s a 100% cotton, which is actually what most people wanted. But there’s still some people that aren’t allowed to have that in their lab for different reasons.
And so there’s some different materials that we could use to expand, I guess, how many people we can help with that even just with that one design. And so along with that, I think once that’s kinda up and running, I would love to, like I said, start visiting labs and just talking through things and watching what they do and fielding ideas.
I mean, I get emails from people maybe once a month about ideas that they have and, because I think we’ve already just kinda set that expectation that we’re open to anybody’s ideas. If you have a good problem to solve, we’re open to it. And so if anybody’s listening and they have an idea that they don’t wanna manufacture themselves and, I’m happy to help design it and figure out a way to get it to labs, you know, even on a small scale. So that’s really where I wanna focus.
Final Thoughts for Grad Students and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
BT: So before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts or words of wisdom that you would like to share with grad students, who are interested in entrepreneurship and continuing in science or anything about the PhD journey in general?
DM: With entrepreneurship, I think it’s important to realize that you don’t have to be a business owner to be an inventor. Like, I kind of am doing both, but those are kind of different skill sets. And if you just wanna invent, you can just invent and license products and not have to deal with all the management and logistics and things like that.
And I just kinda fell into doing all of it, anyway. And I think if you wanted to get into entrepreneurship, you have to really be excited about it. Because if you’re just doing it because you think it’s easy or you can easily make some money on the side, it’s probably not unless you’re a really highly skilled individual that’s doing some kind of service or consulting work. That is a really good way to do it.
But starting a business is is a ton of work, and it’s even more work than you think it’s going to be when you start. And so you have to be excited about it, and you have to be motivated and have the right reasons, I think, to do it. And so, you know, just make sure that when you’re starting, you know why you’re doing it.
Because when things go wrong or things are going downhill, you have to, like, go back to what is your original motivation for doing it. Same thing with your PhD, really. It’s when things get really tough and you don’t wanna do any work anymore, I usually just sit back and think like, why am I here? Why am I doing this in the first place? And if you kind of search for that inner motivation again, that helps you get out of that rut a lot of times. And so I would just say that, you know, to get into it, you really need to be excited about it, and you really wanna do it, to get you through all the hard parts.
And same thing with the PhD. If you’re deciding to do a PhD, you need to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons or it’s gonna be really, really hard, and it’s gonna be a struggle, when things are going wrong.The PhD work is not fun to do the things. You’re pushing buttons and mixing powders. Nobody would think that’s fun. But you’re there because the process, like, the outcomes are fun. You know, and you got your motivation to carry you through doing all of that stuff. And that’s I think what’s really important is to find that motivation and key into that, and then you won’t get as like, your lows won’t be as low, and then you can really celebrate the highs and be excited about them.
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