Six months after cashing in her 401(k) and moving to Raleigh for a dream job, Stacy Ahua was laid off.
Alone in a new city amid the 2020 lockdown, she found herself doing what everyone was doing in the pandemic. She made banana bread. She tried Zoom happy hours.
And she experimented with a hobby she had always wanted to try.
In an interview, she explains how the hobby turned into a Usu Company— a startup she never saw coming – and how it would never have happened without a pink slip.
Ahua moved to North Carolina, sight unseen, in late 2019, just a few months before the lockdown. She funded the move by cashing out her 401(k) and taking on a job as program manager at the Alzheimer’s Association, Eastern North Carolina Chapter. But the association – like many firms in the early pandemic days of 2020 – had to tighten, and Ahua was a casualty.
Ahua, whose entire career had been in community building and nonprofits, was lost.
So she tried a new hobby that July: candle making – and soon built connections and a company.
“I tell everybody that candle making was on my pandemic bingo card,” she said. “I really enjoyed the process.
And she found she could use candles to tell stories. Ahua is a native of Mississippi, but her family is from Nigeria – roots she began to explore through her new hobby. She named the candles after people, memories, places from Nigeria that were important to her.
“I wrote the story about what the candle was inspired by and matched the scent to those stories,” she said.
In September, she launched a business, calling it Usu, a word from her family’s tribe for fire, or light.
To fund it, Ahua funneled in “everything I got from my severance.” She poured in the proceeds of a lawsuit settlement. Altogether, she estimates spending about $3,000 to start the company, from acquiring materials to building a website. Lockdown made being lean easy, Ahua said.
“I just poured everything I had into it,” she said. “It was easy to live a little more slim because there was nothing else to do.”
And when vendor markets started to operate again in October, Ahua signed up.
The first break came in December, at a two-day market organized at the North Carolina Musuem of Art. There, her candles attracted the attention of a museum executive, who had seen Ahua’s company on Instagram. The candles soon found their way into the museum gift store.
And gradually, awareness started to grow.
Along the way, the museum helped initiate a new business line, custom scent design work. NCMA commissioned candles for new events and exhibitions “so I get to create something specifically for the art, the artist.”
“That sort of snowballed into scent design work for places like RTP – I have a custom candle with them,” she said. “I didn’t know I had a nose for business and I didn’t know how much I could incorporate storytelling.”
By the end of last year, she had reached the six-figure mark in income.
Today, in addition to selling candles wholesale and designing custom scents, she teaches workshops and corporate team-building initiatives. She’s secured a small production location in downtown Cary.
And it never would have happened without a pink slip.
Ahua isn’t alone. Several entrepreneurs throughout the region say they started their companies after terminations from other employers – particularly relevant in 2023, a year of very public layoffs, from the recent announcement at Red Hat to earlier rounds at firms such as Google and Microsoft.
Here are some examples:
Brian Burnett, the founder of Glenwood South Tailors & Alterations in Raleigh, started his company after a layoff, growing it to the point where it attracted J. Cole’s business during the recent Dreamville Festival.
Natalie Waggett, the founder of Wilmington-based tech firm Ohanafy, which targets the craft beer industry, started her company after reevaluating her life after a layoff and a personal tragedy.
Craig Merrigan, the founder of Spotlight Solar, was a lifelong marketer at IBM and Lenovo until a layoff round in 2009 prompted a reevaluation and a startup.
Mark Buff started antenna firm Mohu after being laid off of Alcatel Lucent and, like Ahua, cashing in his 401(k). The firm was later sold to St. Louis-based Antennas District, and he started a new company, Profit Frog.
