What started out as a hunt for a coronavirus-safe summer job turned into a path to entrepreneurship for two Oldham County teens.
In 2020, Quentin Proud and Darren Grendi both had summer jobs lined up in the retail sector when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Understandably, their parents didn't want them to work in public-facing jobs when the virus was still spreading rapidly, but Proud and Grendi still wanted to gain experience — and of course, make money.
So the two students, Grendi at Saint Xavier High School and Proud at North Oldham High School, got creative.
Fortunately, they didn't have to start completely from scratch. Back in middle school, Grendi and one of his other friends had started a coin resale business on eBay. He and Proud looked to do it again, this time with vintage items.
"We were going to go buy antiques," Proud said. "My grandmother did some of that, and she encouraged us to try it. We went around with flyers to every house in our neighborhoods and a few others to get our name out there and tell people to call us if they have items like baseball cards, furniture... but we got no calls.
"We were able to get some things at yard sales, but it became pretty clear that what was easiest to find was electronics."
Video games. Headphones. Gaming consoles. Chargers.
Yard sales had an abundance of them. When the summer of 2020 and yard sale season ended, Proud and Grendi turned to Craigslist and OfferUp to source inventory, but it wasn't until they started buying liquidation lots in early 2021 that they really found a sustainable business model.
It was a need for time management that pushed them in the right direction, Grendi said.
"Quentin and I have both had really intensive school schedules over the past two years," he said. "Juggling the business with school, athletics, social life and sleep has definitely been hard, but it was a learning opportunity."
Proud said those busy schedules limited the amount of inventory they could source through Craigslist, so they looked to buy liquidation lots — pallets of used, returned or broken items — that they could sort through and post to eBay in their minimal free time.
That's also how the business became a limited liability company, PG Invicta Enterprises LLC. The "PG" is an acronym of their last names, Proud and Grendi.
"These liquidation sites are multimillion, if not billion dollar companies and they don't want to deal with a couple of 17 year olds," Proud said. "We were able to move past that with a LLC."
With a steady stream of inventory, PG Invicta Enterprises took off. It sold working products at a mark-up on eBay, and even found a niche set of buyers that purchase broken items for parts on the resale platform.
To date, the company has sold more than 4,300 items for more than $225,000. Amid that success, it's also recently hosted fundraisers for the Red Cross and Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund.
Proud and Grendi are both planning to go to college in the fall and could be potentially thousands of miles away from one another. Proud will be attending Dartmouth College next year and plans to major in economics with a minor in Computer Science. Darren will be attending Carnegie Mellon with a major in business administration (computational finance concentration) while potentially dual majoring in physics or computer science.
They are currently working on how they can continue the business as they go off to school, whether that be through hiring an employee or a new kind of buyer-to-buyer platform. They said they may potentially hire an app developer for the task.
"Really, the long and the short of it is that we have a very fluid business model and we’re continuing to explore of a variety of different directions that best suit our upcoming restrictions," Proud said.
"We made a little bit of money, which has helped, but we were also developing skills — being able to communicate with those large buyers companies on a professional level, time management, developing and implementing a strategy — I think that's what we've really taken away from this," Grendi said.
