Today we’d like to introduce you to Faby Rangel.
Hi Faby, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
I started my first business in 2016 by accident. I was heading to San Diego State in the fall of 2016, and I knew I needed a way to make money, at the time I was still living in my hometown of Ventura, CA and I worked at the Outlets trying to save up for college. While I was working at the outlets, I got to know a group of people that I would call the “ebayers”, it was a group of adults that would come into the store early in the morning and bulk buy hundreds of pairs of shoes and resell them on eBay. As I got to know them, I started getting comfortable asking them questions like: How do you list your shoes? How do you get your pictures to look professional? Does this make a good living? I was at this time making $200-300 a month and I was worried about how I was going to pay for college. One day, I was stopped by one of the eBayers and she told me that I should invest in buying shoes, she said, “I do not want you to have to worry about paying for anything while you’re in college and this business you can do!” When she looked at me and said those words, something inside of me ignited and so I quit my job and took the little earnings I had from my two part-time jobs invested into buying my first pairs of shoes to resell. I started selling the first pairs I had to the people I knew; I was letting them know I had UGG Boots, Teva’s, and Hokas and engaged in conversation by asking them their shoe sizes! They were all so supportive, and they were buying shoes from me. What I had made in a month at my two jobs, I was able to make with 3 sales! I was shocked, because I did less work and I got a great return on my investment, the more I sold to my friends the more I was getting hooked on reselling.
It was still July 2016, and I only had a month until I was moving to San Diego, and I still had lots of shoes left to sell. So, my dad gave me the idea of doing a “pop-up” at my house and inviting family members, friends and family. The party was so successful, and I was shocked that I was now able to afford a new laptop that I so desperately needed. The following day after the pop-up, I was invited by a friend of mine to take some shoes to her work, to try and see if her coworkers wanted to buy shoes from me. And so, I packed up my parent’s green Safari Astro Van with 40 pairs of shoes and set up shop in an old run-down parking lot in Santa Paula. As I was waiting there for the ladies to exit work, I was approached and threatened by a man who wanted to take the money and all my shoes. I immediately got nervous and tried to pack everything up, but my car ran out of battery, and I was stuck. Luckily, one of the ladies’ husbands helped me, and I was on my way back home. As I was driving home to myself, “I really need to be more careful, what if he could have robbed me!” I parked my car in my parent’s driveway, and I got a notification on my phone from an app I never heard about, called Poshmark, and the rest is history.
I sold my first pair of UGG Women’s Sienna Rain Boots in November 2016 and sold them within 30 minutes of uploading, and once again I was hooked. With the earnings from my pop-up and the early sales I had from Poshmark, I continued to re-invest back into my business. I have since sold over 4,000 pairs of shoes across three platforms Poshmark, being my #1 platform followed by eBay, Mercari, and Depop. My store managed to pay for my living expenses and study abroad program and allowed me to put money into my savings account. With the help of my family, I built out an excel inventory system that allows me to scan in/out all my items, I currently house over 500 pairs of active listings and my mom is my operations manager who also helps me buy, ship, and manage my inventory system. I started out with no idea of how to run a business, but I watched videos on YouTube, re-invested my money, and was focused on scaling the operations behind my business. I wanted things to be seamless, and run efficiently, and I set up systems for my mom to be able to work so I could be away from my business while I was still finishing my Bachelor’s Degree at San Diego State.
This business allowed me to make a living while I was at San Diego State. I would sit in the Love Library on Mondays after I drove back from Ventura at 4 AM and list, list, list, and cross-list on all my platforms. Before I got proper storage, I was putting all my boxes underneath my bed in college, and driving to the post office in between my classes. As I started scaling, I began watching how resellers grew their businesses on Poshmark and their tricks to increasing sales, and really started to look at this not as a “side hustle” but as a true and scalable business. I now looked at myself as a business owner with a virtual assistant! Through this business, I learned I had a passion for entrepreneurship, and it reminded me of my upbringing. Both my parents had several successful businesses one of them being Real Estate and so in the summer of 2018, I started a part-time job at a small family-owned brokerage in La Jolla CA working the weekend leads and helping agents with listing presentations and marketing. And once again… I was hooked.
It was the summer of 2018, and I got a part-time job where I was allowed to do school work, and Poshmark, and I just needed to help the agents who came in for help. I grew to like the conversations I was having with the agents, and they all told me Real Estate was an amazing business to be in. That same brokerage gave me my first job after college, and I learned so much about the marketing side of Real Estate and how fast-paced and dynamic you had to be to survive a cutthroat industry. Fast forward 3 years, and I was now the office manager for one of the Top Luxury Brokerages in La Jolla, working hand in hand with the best agents in San Diego. I was in charge of onboarding new agents with our company, running the operations of the office, helping with major company events, and running meetings with the CEO and marketing directors all while operating my Poshmark business in the evenings and driving back and forth from San Diego to Ventura on the weekends to purchase new inventory for my store. And just like the early conversations I had with the eBayers, the agents in my office began to ask me when I was going to take my next move and become an agent and so in March 2020, I got my Real Estate License.
I am now the business owner of the Rangel Realty Group with Keller Williams in La Jolla and the owner of SnuggWear on Poshmark. I am an advocate for women entrepreneurs and Latina business owners, who have a passion for business and want to learn about how to make sound investments in Real Estate. I lead my businesses by being focused on education first and building those long-lasting relationships. Through this article, I want to show others that it is possible to create a life and a business that you want by breaking past your own limiting beliefs.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has not been a smooth journey; I was often afraid of investing my money back into my business because I did not know when I would see the return. What helped me with this was watching videos of other entrepreneurs who talked about mindset and how to move past the limiting beliefs that we often put on ourselves. I had emotional attachments to the items that I would purchase, and would get upset when people did not want to buy my full-price items, and I would rather not make the sale. When I set up my inventory system, I learned that it was costing me more money to have the items on the shelf and to focus on making the sale versus no sale at all. I also did not look at myself as a business owner because people often referred to what I was doing as a “little business” and they would put me down for saying I was an “entrepreneur”. I have since learned that anyone who had the consistency to build a business and make a profit is a business owner, and those looking down on you sometimes wish they had the confidence you had to start something of their own and were not afraid of failure.
In my real estate career, there were many women who did not look like me and struggled with confidence in the early years of my career. However, through experiences, hard work, and holding myself to a higher professional standard I grew the confidence to know I was on the right path and to remove those limiting beliefs in myself. I also asserted myself, asked questions, and prepared myself to know the ins and outs of my job so much that I was not looked down upon. Women of color often feel this way, and I knew that I wanted to overcome this by putting in the work and not allowing others’ perceptions of me to be a reality.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
I own an e-commerce business on Poshmark named SnuggWear and I sell UGGs, Teva, Sanuk, and Hoka Shoes. I am known on Poshmark for being the “UGG Plug”, I have 151k followers on Poshmark and have over 200k on just my Poshmark platform. I am most proud of the fact that I started with only 50 pairs of shoes, and I have since scaled my business to having sold over 4,000 pairs of shoes, all while being a full-time student at San Diego State and finishing my Bachelor’s Degree in International Conflict Resolution and minor in Business Communications.
I remember my parents sitting down with our realtor as a kid and thinking this was the most boring thing ever! But I would then get excited when my dad would tell me to help him tear up the carpet in a new fixer he just purchased. When it comes to my real estate business, I led with honesty, transparency, and education first. Purchasing a home is an emotional process that encompasses many things in one’s life, and I want my clients to feel heard, and know they have someone who will properly guide them about the process of making one of the biggest financial investments they will make in their lives. I also understand how much effort and sacrifice it takes to make money, and I do not take this responsibility lightly. I want to make sure all my clients can look to me as a guide who will lead them to a great financial investment.
I am proud that I have been able to overcome the struggles that I experienced as a kid. I was always told I was not good in school, that I was bad at math and I was held back. I was always the kid that teachers would call my parents and tell them I was not at the pace of my classmates; this deterred my confidence as a kid. But I look back at that now, and it taught me that I was a person who needed to learn at my own pace, away from distractions, and that even though I was a bit slower than others when it came to learning, I was not “dumb” or didn’t understand. It forced me to do the extra work that came easier to others, and now I have no problem staying longer to finish something because I was always dedicated to putting in the extra work as a younger child. I was always focused on finishing something I started, and that early experience with struggling in school and having to consistently work on my own helped me scale my business to what they are today.
I want other women to believe that they are capable of achieving things that they see in others and that their dreams are not far out of reach. I want people to know that many of the opportunities we often pass up as Latinas are because of our own limiting beliefs and the voices inside of our heads that tell us we are not deserving. I also want others to know that even though I have two businesses I still have to work on motivating myself daily and give myself patience to grow, fail, and get back up again!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://fabyrangel.kw.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/faby.rangelrealty/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faby.rangel.7
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC4QqHxvDOwRqJMO3Ty3BVQ
- Other: https://linktr.ee/snugg_wear
Image Credits
Faby Rangel
