This Founder Friday, Hustle & Grace’s Cindi Greentree shares the TikTok moment that changed everything and the lessons she learned building a brand from zero in under a year.
“The most important lesson I have learned is to do the personal work on yourself and your identity, to show up as your true self and not be apologetic for it.”
Cindi Greentree was not sitting in a boardroom plotting her next business move when Hustle and Grace was born. She was scrolling TikTok after a long day, tired of hauling too many bags to work and quietly fed up that nothing on the market solved what felt like a pretty straightforward problem.
As a woman in a leadership role managing large teams, she needed one bag that could carry her laptop, her lunch, her charger, and everything else her day demanded, without looking like she had packed for a camping trip. “Nothing worse than coming into the office with your lunch Tupperware and banana on show,” she says.
The TikTok she stumbled across that evening showed her something she had never considered. You can design a product yourself, send the specs to a manufacturer, and have it made just for you. So she did exactly that. She sat down, sketched out everything she had ever wanted in a work bag, and sent it off to a manufacturer on Alibaba. The plan was just to make one, for herself, and solve the problem once and for all.
The bag that started everything
“I designed the bag from scratch to include all the elements I wanted in the perfect work bag.”
The prototype arrived and it was right. A padded laptop sleeve, an insulated compartment for food or a bottle, hidden card slots, a wipeable makeup pouch, convertible straps, a structured base, and a built-in charging port, all wrapped in lightweight eco-luxe vegan leather. She wore it to work and people immediately started asking where she got it. Friends wanted one. Coworkers wanted one. Her mum wanted one. Before long she had handed out every prototype she had and the encouragement to start selling was impossible to ignore.
She launched Hustle and Grace in September 2025. The Iluka Tote sold out multiple times in the months that followed. The business now generates around $20,000 a month in revenue and has been named a finalist in The Beam Awards for Product of the Year and The Australian Small Business Champions. Not bad for something that started as a sketch on a quiet evening at home.
Building trust from zero
“Awards are such a brilliant way to gain exposure and trustworthiness as a brand, especially when you’re new to market.”
Launching a brand nobody has heard of and trying to earn the trust of customers who have no reason to choose you over a familiar name is one of the hardest parts of starting from scratch. Cindi approached it deliberately. Entering awards early gave Hustle and Grace external credibility that would have taken years to build organically. But she also knew that trust is personal, not just institutional.
She uses a platform called Bonjorno to record a short personal video for every customer after a sale, looking directly into camera and telling them how much their support means to her. “This really gives a personal touch to an online world and lets my customers know they are genuinely valued,” she says. “I think good old fashioned gratitude goes so far.” In a world of automated responses and faceless transactions it is the kind of gesture that a larger brand simply cannot replicate, and it has become one of the cornerstones of how Hustle and Grace builds loyalty.
The lessons that came the hard way
“I have always thought that business is like running a marathon not a sprint. There will be ebbs and flows, but don’t let the hard times get you down.”
Selling out quickly is a good problem until you realise you have a growing waitlist and no stock to fill it. Cindi introduced presales to manage both the demand and the cashflow, letting customers lock in their order while the next batch was being produced. It has become one of the tools she relies on most to keep the business running smoothly.
The harder lesson arrived when her manufacturer shut down for an extended period over Chinese New Year, leaving her without stock for far longer than she had planned. “I didn’t realise that manufacturers close down for significant timeframes for Chinese New Year,” she says. “This left me without stock for a large amount of time.” She worked hard with her supplier to get moving again as quickly as possible but the gap was real. She has since built forecasting tools into her planning to make sure it does not happen again.
What she knows now
“Go for it. It has changed my life significantly. I am now happy in my role as Founder.”
Cindi is honest about what it takes to build something from nothing. The knockbacks come. There are stretches where the momentum stalls and the doubt creeps in. But she would do it all again and she says so without hesitation. Her advice to anyone sitting on a business idea is direct: stop waiting for perfect conditions and start. “Don’t be afraid to get in front of the camera because your community and customers want to see you,” she says. “People genuinely want to be a part of a brand, they want to love it as much as you do, so give them reason to do that.”
The advice she comes back to most, though, is about identity. The businesses that stand out are not the ones that copy what is working for everyone else. They are the ones that lean into what makes them genuinely different and stay there. For Hustle and Grace that difference is Cindi herself. She is the customer she built the product for, which means she understands better than anyone what the women buying her bag actually need. “Find the zone in which you are different,” she says. “Don’t follow everyone else and celebrate what makes your brand uniquely yours.”
It started with a TikTok and a sketchpad. It turned into something women across Australia are stopping strangers to ask about. That is the whole story, really.
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