The suction cup was the whole thing. A small silicone circle that sticks to the back of your phone and grips onto anything — a mirror, a treadmill, a car window — so your hands are free. That's it. That's the idea that Charlotte Trecartin turned into more than ten million dollars in sales.
She built it from her dad's basement.
No investors waiting in a conference room. No agency running her ads. Charlotte hired a TikTok coach for $400 a month and learned to speak directly to the people who would actually buy the thing. She made videos. She watched what landed. She made more. And somewhere in the middle of all that scrappy, unglamorous repetition, CharCharms ended up on the shelves at Target and Walmart.
Most people, at that point, would exhale. Charlotte started building again.
Here is the part I find myself thinking about. The first win is loud. Everyone loves the basement-to-Target story — I love it too. But there's a quieter version of a founder that almost no one talks about. It's the woman who already proved she could do it once, who has every reason to coast, and who instead sits back down at the desk and starts something brand new while the first thing is still running.
That's WallCandy. Charlotte started it from scratch, on the side, while CharCharms was still very much a full-time animal.
And then she did something that takes a particular kind of nerve. She started writing it all down. Publicly. Every dollar, every decision, every misstep — in a Substack newsletter that anyone can read. Not the highlight reel. The receipts.
I want to sit with how rare that is.
Because the first success buys you the option to hide. You can let people assume you always knew what you were doing. You can quietly bury the false starts and only show the wins. Charlotte chose the opposite. She's letting people watch the second act while it's still awkward, still uncertain, still in the part where nobody knows if it'll work.
There was no villain here — no gatekeeper who forced her hand. She simply understood something a lot of us learn the hard way. The story people actually need isn't the finished thing on the Target shelf. It's the messy middle, the $400 coach, the night you doubt the whole idea and open the laptop anyway.
The first business proved she could win. The newsletter proves she's willing to show you how.
I think that's the real gift she's handing other founders. Not a suction cup. Not a Substack. A permission slip.
Because the world tells you a successful woman has arrived, has figured it out, has nothing left to prove. Charlotte keeps quietly proving that arriving was never the point.
She's already done the impossible once. So the interesting question isn't whether WallCandy makes it.
It's what she starts building the day after it does.
