When undergraduate marketing student Vansh Sobti got tasked with combining two different products into one for a school project back in 2021, he had no way of knowing it would be the most important homework assignment of his lifeLess than five years later, one of the ideas that grew out of that homework—a hoodie with stress balls built into the cuffs, designed to help wearers deal with anxiety and overstimulation—has grown well beyond its classroom origins. It’s now a full-fledged company, Cloud Nine Clothing, which Sobti, finally finished with school and working on the brand full time, says made $10 million in annual revenue last year.

“When I was doing this assignment, it was a couple of months after Covid had lifted, so I myself was experiencing a lot of anxiety, especially social anxiety,” the 22-year-old, Vancouver-based founder explains. “At home, I would use these different fidgets—like stress balls or fidget spinners, anything that I could get my hands on—but the idea of using them in public, I was like, ‘I would not want anyone to see me using these different tools,’ just because it draws so much attention to you, which kind of defeats the purpose.”

He actually set the idea aside for a while after coming up with it, Sobti tells Inc., but revisited it a year after the class during another bout of anxiety, and thought it might have legs. Cloud Nine officially launched to the public in April 2023.“If I could see me using this, I’m sure there are at least 10 other people around me that could also find this beneficial,” he says. “I made it for me initially, and then I was hoping that other people wanted it as well.”

It wasn’t Sobti’s first foray into entrepreneurship, however. He’d been into drop-shipping as a teenager, which he says was “mainly just for fun” at the time but also gave him skills he’s since funneled back into scaling Cloud Nine.

“It set me up for success in [terms] of knowing what type of products people resonate with,” the young entrepreneur explains. “The key takeaway from those years of doing drop-shipping was, great products start with understanding people. It’s a lot harder to sell people on a product where it’s not necessarily solving any problem, because you have to then sell them the problem for them to purchase the product—whereas if your product is solving a problem, people are already resonating with that, so it’s a lot easier to advertise a product where people see it fitting into their life seamlessly.”

His drop-shipping side hustle also fueled Cloud Nine more directly: Sobti got the clothing brand off the ground using $5,000 of his own savings, which he says mostly came from his prior drop-shipping experiments. (Pretty much all of that capital went to prototyping the hoodie design, he adds. The company remains fully bootstrapped.)

“Over these couple years of my entrepreneurship journey, the main thing that I’ve always heard is like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that because you’re too young, you need more knowledge,’ or ‘You don’t have experience so we can’t help you out,’” he says. “But my biggest piece of advice is, resilience and grit are so much more important than age and knowledge.”