How To Build A Million Dollar Business Between Classes

Two Northeastern students whose big idea was a stick-on wallet for the back of a smartphone built a $1.2 million business in between classes before selling it in January.

Giovanni Carlos Armonies-Assalone and Connor Gross won’t say how much they received for Cardly, as they named the company, but Armonies-Assalone said the partners were happy with the price they received.

Both Armonies-Assalone and Gross spent their first semesters as freshmen abroad in 2016. When they came back to Boston, they had the same class in international business.

“We’re pretty entrepreneurial,” Gross said. “Giovanni was buying and reselling greeting cards. We wanted to have a business together and we didn’t care what we sold.”

The partners noticed around campus that their fellow students were putting stick-on pockets on the backs of their phones to carry credit cards and ID.

“Kids will stick anything on a phone,” Gross said. “We quickly learned people spend a lot of money on phone cases, $20 or $30, because they like the utility.”

Armonies-Assalone and Gross came up with their own designs for the stick-on phone “wallets” and placed an order with a supplier in China.

“We didn’t have an exact sales strategy,” Armonies-Assalone said. “We thought they were cool. We would buy one.”

Filling a trash bag with a couple thousand Cardlys, the partners began selling them in the cafeteria.

“Finally we said hey Amazon is a huge marketplace,” Gross said. “We listed them on Amazon and things took off right away. We were selling dozens a day without having to sell them ourselves.”

The Cardly cell phone stick-on wallet sells on Amazon.com for $6.99 or $7.99 for two, depending on the design.

“We were selling so many by sophomore and junior years we would show up to residence mail and have a shipment of 20 to 30 50-pound boxes,” Gross said.

Armonies-Assalone and Gross aren’t sure what they’ll do after graduation, which of course has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. Diplomas will come in the mail and in-person celebrations are up in the air. But Gross is certain there’s a second act to come.

“The one trait Gio and I possess that helped us is we both have a strong bias for action,” Gross said. “We tried to sell several things in college, whether it was water bottles or website building services. Not a lot of them worked, but what separates us from others is we’re not afraid to take the first step and get started.”