Charlotte Trecartin was a full-time student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working toward a degree in Kinesiology with minors in Business and Chemistry, when the idea for CharCharms came to her — literally sitting in her sunroom during the peak of COVID lockdown, staring at her water bottle. “I was super bored & it was the peak COVID when everyone was at home,” she’s said of the moment. “I was sitting in my sunroom with my tumbler and I had the idea to hang stuff on my bottle.”
That idle thought became a real design process by fall 2020: sketching, prototyping, and — critically — funding the patent and prototyping work herself, using income from a summer door-to-door coupon sales job she’d taken specifically to bankroll the idea. CharCharms officially launched its first product collection on September 24, 2021, offering more than 40 different bottle hooks and 400 different decorative charms.
Trecartin’s path to the company is its own kind of case study in stacking odd jobs into capital: alongside her coursework, she’d also worked as a nanny, a competitive bodybuilder, and a cycling instructor — none of it directly related to product design, all of it apparently useful for funding one. The company has since been featured in the Chicago Sun-Times and built a TikTok following that grew from nothing to more than 60,000, with a stated goal of reaching 500,000.
Her read on what actually drove that growth is unglamorous and specific: “The key to growth on TikTok, I learned, was consistency and posting regularly.” No secret algorithm hack — just showing up on a schedule, as a full-time student running a real, patented product line on the side.