Meet Chris Venturini. A 23 year old senior majoring in management and owner of his own business, Detour. Detour is a sunglasses company that offers an alternative to expensive designer shades. They offer sunglasses that are inexpensive so you can use them on a daily basis for whatever activities you’re into without worrying about breaking or losing them. (Check out the bottom of the homepage for a little more info about the company, Detour.)
HC (HerCampus): How did your business start? What piqued your interest in sunglasses?
CV (Chris Venturini): I actually started a clothing company when I was about 18 or 19 and Detour was kind of the next step up from that. The clothing company was basically a huge learning experience on how to build a business and get things done. Made a lot of mistakes doing that but they were all huge learning experiences. I started carrying sunglasses at one point and they were a huge seller. The clothing company went well, I learned more then I could imagine and I made a little money in the process but these days everyone and their mothers owns their own clothing company, and it’s really hard to compete when you have hundreds of thousands of competitors. Since the sunglasses sold so well through the clothing company, I decided to start a strictly sunglasses brand that offers more variety with better quality shades. The sunglasses took off so well that I didn’t have much time to be running the clothing company so I decided to shut that down and just strictly focus on Detour. When I started Detour I had no idea it would have grown so fast.
HC: Where did the name Detour come from?
CV: Now a days everyone is in such a hurry to do everything. Everyone tries to get where they are going as fast as possible, people want to grow up super quick, land jobs that consume their lives right out of school and very few people take enough time to actually enjoy life. When things get too hectic I like to just take a detour. If I am going somewhere sometimes I’ll take the scenic route, if I feel I’m stressing too much I’ll jump in my car and head to the lake to do some fishing, basically its about doing things spur of the moment that you enjoy because if you start putting things off then life is just going to pass you by and before you know it you will be 50 and still working at your sh*tty job that you hate! Haha. If that’s the route you are going to take you can make it less sh*tty by taking breaks from whatever it is that you do and go do something exciting, relaxing or anything YOU enjoy.
HC: Do you sell anything besides sunglasses? If so, what?
CV: Right now just sunglasses, t-shirts, and some women’s tanks.
HC: Is there anyone who inspired you or helped you make Detour what it is today?
CV: The support of friends and family so far has been awesome!
HC: How did you market or advertise your business?
CV: I’ve used a bunch of different ways to market/advertise. The one that has had the biggest impact was Instagram. When I first signed up for Instagram I was trying to think of ways to get Detour’s page out there to a bigger audience. I decided to check out the popular page and find people with big accounts and try and contact them and offer them free shades in exchange for posting pictures of Detour Sunglasses. This worked for a little then the whole advertising on Instagram thing pretty much exploded and these pages started charging fees to advertise. Doing this got us to about 20k followers. Lately the pages we use to use have turned into just big advertising machines and the results of advertising with them hasn’t been that significant so we stopped doing that not too long ago.
HC: Who is the most well known person that you have sold a pair of sunglasses to (if you know of any)?
CV: I’m not sure who the most well known person that bought a pair of glasses is, but we have done collaborations with some well known people who now wear Detours. We worked with Rusko (DJ), Zoella (youtube blogger), JstuStudios (youtube channel), and currently we are working with Sheridyn Fisher (model) and Justin Boston (professional stock car racer, pictured below).
HC: Summarize a day in the life of you. Do you find it difficult trying to manage your time?
CV: During the winter my life isn’t very exciting haha. When summer rolls around it gets pretty fun. Lots of wakeboarding, hanging on the beach, drag racing at the track and all that fun stuff! I don’t find it too hard to manage time. I work for myself so I can set my own schedule and take time off whenever I need. I’m a huge fan of using lists to organize my days so that makes time management pretty easy.
HC: Where do you see your business going from here?
CV: Hopefully it just keeps growing!
HC: Do you have any goals for Detour’s future?
CV: Of course! Eventually I’d like to start contacting stores to have them carry Detour, but currently I don’t think we’re ready for that. Possibly this summer we will get rolling on that. My ultimate goal for Detour would be to get it big enough to have a decent sized warehouse and to hire my friends and family. Another ultimate goal would be to make a difference! A couple months ago I saw a YouTube video about people doing random acts of kindness and you can tell it made peoples days. After that I started including an extra pair of shades in everyone’s order along with a note I typed up basically saying that in exchange for the free pair of shades you have to do something nice for a stranger. It could be anything from buying the person behind you in line a cup of coffee, giving flowers to a stranger, sitting next to the kid at lunch who eats by themself or as simple as writing a note to a stranger telling them they’re awesome. I never openly advertised doing this so it was a pretty big surprise to a lot of the people getting this and their feedback was pretty amazing. Got a lot of awesome emails back!
HC: What celebrity do you think you would be best friends with?
CV: Not sure, my friends are all pretty awesome so ill probably just hold on to them over any celebrities.
If anyone wants to get in contact with Chris, you can send him an email at chris@detoursunglasses.com
Chris is giving 20% off for HerCampus readers! Use the code: HERCAMPUS20
Detour’s social media links are: