Elisabeth Rioux is a prominent Instagram influencer celebrity and a successful business woman at a very early age. Her company name is HOAKA SWIMWEAR. She started working on it when she was just 17 and then at the age of 18 the company came into life.
What was her journey to success?
Many people wonder how she got to the point she is at the moment. Plenty of them are speculating and taking their own conclusions. She shares that sometimes she feels really overwhelmed by the amount of questions she is getting about this topic. She emphasizes that the success didn’t influence her and she still remains a normal person who likes doing casual activities.
„I still like simple things like having my dogs and my cat and watching movies and things like that so I’m still a really normal big person that I’m still the same so I just hope it won’t change anything about what you think about me.”
Elisabeth also says that making money was never her first plan goal. She had always been dreaming of being able to travel the world. Now , because of being an entrepreneur and having a financial freedom, she can live her passion. Also, when she is traveling she doesn’t like spending money on nothing like too expensive hotels. If you see her being in an hotel, it means she is doing a collaboration. She wouldn’t pay for it from her own budget. Elisabeth knows the importance of saving money. She doesn’t drink alcohol and barely party. It is very helpful cause it cuts many expenses that people usually have, if they do so.
Elisabeth’s success story was questioned multiple times.
Many people think that she is rich because her parents were rich. Well, the truth is that her family was not poor, but they neither had an unusual amount of money. As a child, she lived in a small apartment with her family: her parents and three of her sisters. Her parents didn’t have an enormous and unusual amount of money. They had what they had only because they were working and saving as well. They were teaching her this skill since a young age. She wanted a car so at age 12 she had already started saving to get her car once she turned 17. Elisabeth started working at an ice cream shop during the summer, during the rest of the year she was going to school. Rioux shares that she even didn’t have enough money to buy herself new clothes cause her parents didn’t have enough of a budget to provide this. She was getting everything from her older sister, when they were not fitting her anymore. When eventually she started working, she started to have money so she let herself buy too many unnecessary things, what, as she says, was a big mistake.
„You have money but you spend it on things you don’t need and now you need something and you just don’t have money anymore.”
After some time, Elisabeth started to look for another, better-paid job than the one at an ice cream shop, but people were not taking her seriously. So she got one idea to make money in a different way. Then her entrepreneurship drive woke up.
„In Quebec we have this it’s the black market on Facebook it’s like you just sell your old things so I started buying cell phones” – she says. „I started buying it from people that were selling it at a really low price and then I was selling it at the actual price.”
Eventually Rioux ended up selling bikinis for another company on Facebook. She realized that that was the opportunity, she could go herself for. Then Elisabeth started buying bikinis from the company with a discount because of placing big orders and selling them for an actual price. The discount was not very high, so she couldn’t get a big profit anyway. Then the idea of having her own bikini company appeared in her mind and this is how Hoaka Swimwear came into life.
When she first started to move towards her dream of creating a bikini company, her father was not really sure about it. Eventually he changed his attitude after seeing Elisabeth working so hard on it and started helping her as well with managing the legal stuff. She also shared a part of the company with him simply because it was very difficult to run it all by herself. This is how her parents eventually started to earn more money. The one thing her family stressed most was finishing the university. Her dad is all about the security. Although Elisabeth put some money savings aside, it was still not enough to run the company in a way it should have been run. So her father made a deal with her that if he was supposed to support her financially at the beginning of her business, she was supposed to finish the university in exchange.
Hoaka Swimwear started selling in April 2016 and Elisabeth Rioux was continuously investing money back into the company. It is growing day after day and getting popular. Now it’s one of the best bikini brands, because of its fabric quality and special customer treatment. Elisabeth does many give aways to make their consumers happy and even organizes trips for girls.