We were lucky to catch up with Krishay Ramesh recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Krishay, thanks for joining us today. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

Even though my first sale was when I was 5 years old and “sold” homemade mouthwash to my dad, my first earning happened when I made over $100 by monetizing my YouTube channel at the age of 8. That got me so much excited that I wanted to start selling my own merchandise. That set me off on my entrepreneurial journey, and after that, I ended up selling custom t-shirts, custom masks, and so on, leading up to my current stint as the campus manager for Fresh Prints.

Krishay, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Since early childhood, creativity and entrepreneurship have always been a part of my life, whether coming up with a business idea or creating videos online that became viral.

My first foray into entrepreneurship was when I was five years old. I came up with my own mouthwash product. I mixed toothpaste with water to make an entry-level mouthwash. Then, I developed a premium version with Gatorade instead of water. My dad was my first customer.

Around the same age, I started my own YouTube channel where I starred in videos ranging from dancing to tutorials, playing the piano, and many more creative hobbies. One day, after learning about the ability to make money through monetization, I asked my dad to enable it for my channel. In a short period, I accumulated over $100 from ads playing throughout my videos.

At the age of 10, during middle school, I decided to expand my revenue source to sell merch. I came up with a custom t-shirt business idea (I called it KrizTees). I built a website for my brand and started selling custom-designed t-shirts to students. Initially, I focused on the design while outsourcing the printing. Later, I started printing my designs at home using transfer papers. The initial quality of my product was not that great, and customers started complaining about the design fading after one wash. In order to resolve the complaints, I came up with the idea of repositioning my product as ‘Memory Tees,” based on the insight that people valued memory more than functional needs. That resolved the complaints, and I ended up selling a lot more, making over $400 that year.

When I started high school during COVID, I realized the teachers had difficulty remembering our names as our faces were covered with masks. So I came up with the idea of a personalized mask and sold my fellow students masks with their names printed on the front so that the teachers could easily tell their names without being able to fully see their faces.

During high school, I built a 9K TikTok following and quickly achieved a micro-influencer status with over 1M views. Brands began approaching me, and I ended up marketing services (Sports betting app called Omada), apparel (Keecow socks), lifestyle products (like Coldest Water Bottles), cosmetics (MySmiles), and perfumes (I am on the PR list for fragrances like Polo Ralph Lauren and Azzaro). In return, they supplied me with their products every month.

Once I turned 16, I worked at Burger King and Hollister in customer service. Besides earning some money, I even received a $1,000 college scholarship from Burger King.

Currently, I’m a Freshman at St. John’s University, where I am pursuing my passion for marketing while working as a Campus Manager for Fresh Prints (a custom apparel company targeted towards college student organizations and Greek life).

To summarize, I started by gaining experience in product development, moving on to marketing and later customer service. To round it all up, I am currently gaining some valuable sales experience at FreshPrints. Overall, I look forward to gaining full-fledged general management experience by the time I graduate from college in another three and a half years.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My best and most recent experience of demonstrating resilience was when I thought I aced my interview for a campus manager position at Fresh Prints (America’s favorite collegiate merch company) just to get a rejection email from them. Sure that there was a miscommunication with them, I decided not to give up and followed up with clarifications just to get another rejection. I still did not give up and tried a different approach this time to provide a more detailed clarification. The third time was a charm – they were so impressed with my “irrationally unyielding persistence” that they sent an instant offer to join.

This experience went on to prove that the old adage “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Initially, I was super excited to receive a monthly supply of freebies ranging from socks to hundreds of dollars worth of expensive perfumes. However, when people started recognizing me from all over, I realized that it beats the free socks and perfumes (well, at least the socks, lol).

Let me share a few such moments,

1. When I used to work at Burger King, multiple times, some younger customers would stop by and take a selfie with me, making me feel like a celebrity. My co-workers who didn’t know about my TikTok status were impressed by the support I was receiving and started following me.

2. When I told these stories to my dad, he wouldn’t believe me at first, but one day, when my dad and I were at Costco, a kid stopped by and asked his dad to take a picture of him and me. Even his dad shook hands with me. My dad, who watched all this with an open mouth, turned into a believer overnight.

3. Similarly, once, when I was with my mom in an elevator at the doctor’s office, a similar incident happened, which shocked my mom and made her realize.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/krishayramesh
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krishay-ramesh-61513a304/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@krishayramesh
• Other: Feel free to Google me; all my links should be there for clarification. & please use the photos you think fit well in order and for the feature.