How to make money: My pandemic side hustle Pig and Pilgrim boomed 500%

While people were panic-buying toilet paper in April of 2020, Charlie Gosselin and his wife Alexandra Carlton were panic-pivoting to a side-hustle in order to stay afloat.

“When the pandemic hit my work dried up in a second,” recalls Alexandra, a travel and food writer.

“For all we knew this lockdown was going to go on for years. I remember bursting into tears and wondering how we’d survive. I could never have predicted the answer was sitting right in front of us in the form of Charlie’s hobby.”

That ‘hobby’ was something Charlie – a Sydney tradie with a background in the culinary industry – had been tinkering away at for months and one that has since been transformed into the cult bespoke barbecue brand, Pig & Pilgrim.

“I’ve always loved cooking, and working with my hands,” he says. “And I’d been perfecting a design for a Parilla – an Argentinian-style barbecue that could utilise charcoal but with adjustable heat – and that also looked really good.

“And with a lot of downtime on my hands due to the lockdown, our first design was built. Alex told me ‘you’re not keeping that huge thing in our backyard,’ so we put it online and luckily, someone wanted to buy it.”

“I tend to be a planner and Charlie is very spur-of-the-moment,” laughs Alex. “But to be honest with something like a new business, if you dither too much you can plan yourself out of doing anything at all. The reason I think this worked is that we just went for it.

“Charlie built a parilla, I put it on Instagram and it just went from there. If we’d spent months working on business plans and marketing strategies I think we’d have abandoned the idea long ago.”

“Sales started happening slowly,” recalls Charlie. “And at first, it was mostly friends, or friends of friends, who were putting in orders. The first time we sold a barbecue to a complete stranger, who’d simply found the product online, it was a massive milestone. We joked that it was our first case of ‘community transmission’.”

Before long, the enquiries began trickling in – and then the trickle became a flood.

“Over the next few months, I went from being worried that no one was going to order a barbecue to being worried about how I was going to build all the barbecues that people ordered,” Charlie says.

“I’d taken on a new job in September. By October, I’d taken out a lease on a warehouse space and by the end of the month, I’d quit my job and thrown myself into the business full time. It was a good thing, too – that month we had 35 orders come in, with a building staff that consisted of … me.”

Before long, Charlie’s barbecues began to amass a cult following online. Well-known culinary industry giants began contacting the couple to order custom-built products for their restaurants. Jarrod Walsh from Sydney’s Hartsyard got in touch to order one. The kitchen in Berrima’s Eschalot restaurant proudly uses one of Charlie’s custom creations for its monthly Argentinian barbecue night. Matt Moran personally dropped by the warehouse to order his.

“I knew that cooking over fire was growing in popularity with amateur cooks,” says Charlie. “And Pig & Pilgrim products make it less intimidating to get started. But we didn’t predict so much interest from the restaurant world. It’s been amazing to see our product used by world class chefs as well.”

Nearly two years on, Pig & Pilgrim has increased its sales by over 500 per cent. Charlie now employs several tradies who hand-make each barbecue to order – barbecues which then make their way all over Australia and in some cases, the world.

That isn’t to say he’s been able to pull back at all – most of the time he is in the warehouse before the sun comes up and there well into the night. More recently, he’s been taking on a lot of the delivery work as well.

“Covid has affected the business in strange and unexpected ways” explains Charlie. “On one hand, the fact that people are still spending so much time at home has meant our product is still growing in popularity, but like every other business in the country, the Omicron wave has wreaked havoc in terms of shipping and couriers.”

Still, he says, he never could have predicted that his pandemic side hustle would experience such a meteoric rise.

“I’m really glad that it did, but I never take it for granted,” he says, “I think every business owner is all too aware of how hard you need to work to keep things going, and I’m just very grateful we hit on a product people seem to really enjoy.”

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