Managing Expectations

Amy Richardson

Annalisa Thomas

Your business is thriving. It is growing by leaps and bounds, and it is so exciting! But can you keep up with all of the production? Can you afford your supplies? Do you even have the space and personnel to handle your needs?

All of the mompreneurs have had to deal with managing expectations and business realities. Amy Richardson of June & January and Annalisa Thomas of Oilo tell how they handled supply problems, filling orders, controlling growth, streamlining production, understanding limitations, and, very importantly, keeping some space for themselves and their families away from the demands of their businesses.

Amanda Schwab (right), Britt Anderson (left)

June & January

juneandjanuary.com | June & January | @juneandjanuary | @juneandjanuary | juneandjanuary

Amy Richardson

”Don’t I Know You from Somewhere?”

A lot of people ask me for advice on balancing my business, June & January, which sells basic apparel, gifts, and accessories for babies, toddlers, and young kids, with motherhood. Well, there are five words that I hear fairly regularly that say it all: “Are you Little Hip Squeaks?” Ironically enough, I’ve been asked that question more regularly since I changed the company name from Little Hip Squeaks to June & January in June 2015, four years after the business opened. And one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since launching the business is that achieving true balance is next to impossible. There’s always some circumstance ready to pull you from one world into the other.

One time, the question came at the Prospect Park sandbox, shortly after I had finished scolding my son, Eli, for flinging sand in other kids’ faces. Another time was at a public pool, while I was trying to hide my pregnant belly under the water. Once was in an aisle at a Brooklyn Target, a high-stress location where every ounce of strength is spent on just completing the shopping list and navigating the meandering lines without the kids throwing some sort of tantrum. Each time was outside of the context of business, and I was flattered but flustered. What am I wearing? Did I shower today? What had I just said to my kid? Did I toss my coffee cup to the garbage can, miss, and not pick it up?

For an entrepreneur, that is the hardest thing to get used to, the fact that your personal brand and business brands overlap. While it has been incredible to see people embrace Little Hip Squeaks and follow me to June & January, follow me on Instagram, and ask me for advice on business, life, and more, I know that there’s no way to ever just shut it off in the way my husband does when he finishes his work day and closes his laptop. The best thing you can do is to focus on quality—getting as much value as you can out of the time you set aside for your kids or your business. Because you will never feel you have as much time as you think.

My June and January babies.

Colleen Eason

An Early Start

June & January is the culmination of a longtime journey toward entrepreneurship that started way back in high school, when my best friend and I would buy cheap T-shirts from thrift stores, hack them up, and re-sew them into creations that we would sell on eBay. Being on eBay also showed us a growing trend toward “raver-style” apparel, so we started making bright-neon nylon pants and vests made out of Care Bear fabrics. I have always been an entrepreneurial person by nature. I want my career to be something that reflects the hard work and passion that I put into it rather than investing my sweat and effort into someone else’s enterprise.

I started sewing clothes for my unborn boy in 2011 while I was still working as the Teen Vogue account manager for print production. While we stockpiled clothes for Eli’s eventual arrival in June, the big joke in our one-bedroom apartment was that every article of boys’ clothing said something hackneyed and eye-rolling like “Daddy’s Lil’ Slugger.” (“I mean, he won’t even be able to swing a bat for like four or five months!” my husband, Nate, said, getting an early start on being the kind of oafish lame-o that embarrasses his kids with terrible jokes in the carpool.) I studied design in college and had been sewing since third grade, so I felt I could make some clothes that were stylish and unique. I picked up selvages from Jo-Ann Fabrics and other places, favoring Michael Miller–style prints, to turn them into hats, blankets, and burp cloths.

While I knew I had a stylish aesthetic, I hadn’t seriously sewn in years. I had to borrow a serger—a sort of souped-up sewing machine—from a friend to make everything. I set up shop on our kitchen table, lacking any other real place to do so, and spent the last few weekends of my pregnancy to labor on what was supposed to be only a few pieces for my new boy.

We try not to take anything too seriously, including selfies.

Amy Richardson

I probably should’ve been doing something more restful, but that’s not the kind of person I am. I’m not able to just plop on the couch and flip through channels. I’m always thinking about my next project. And that wasn’t always something that could’ve turned into a business. In fact, I spent the year before getting pregnant training for a half marathon—which I ran, in Central Park, with a kidney bean–size Eli in my belly.

The one thing I had always lacked in the past was time. After all, I had a full-time job that paid well, so there wasn’t any sort of existential need to grind out products. That changed when Eli was born and I went on maternity leave. Having a newborn is time-consuming, sure, but my husband worked at home so I was never without a little bit of help, and during naptimes or while he took the little guy out for a walk, I suddenly found myself with time. So I sewed more.

In July 2011, as I attempted to lower myself onto the couch with six-week-old Eli, I felt a pop in my knee and crumpled. An old knee injury from high school soccer had been aggravated by my weight gain and loss through pregnancy, and I found myself almost all the way through my maternity leave needing surgery on my meniscus. I was depressed. As I said, I’m a doer. I like being up and about working on something, not sitting in a tiny, hot apartment unable to walk, depending on my husband to bring my baby to me for feedings. I was able to extend my leave from work because I was unable to commute.

I needed an activity I could do sitting down, and sewing was it.

Suddenly, I found myself with an inventory. I made more hats and blankets and gave them to friends as gifts. (It was a busy summer for babies!) The response was great, and it occurred to me that other people might want them as well. On August 22, 2011, the Little Hip Squeaks Etsy store opened. Over the next few weeks, while I recovered from knee surgery, I expanded my inventory.

A Vision Evolves

My first big break was being featured by Etsy in a few newsletters. Orders picked up fast, and suddenly Jo-Ann selvages weren’t enough. In January 2012, I discovered Spoonflower, a company that allows you to have your own designs printed on fabric, and decided to start offering products with my own unique fabric designs. I was sending new orders to Spoonflower almost daily, from my desk at my day job, and we were regularly getting huge spools of fabric delivered to our fifth-floor door throughout the winter. I would come home from my ten-hour workday (counting the commute to and from midtown Manhattan), feed my son, and then he would go to sleep while I would cut and sew into the night. Saturdays were dedicated to taking pictures and creating Etsy listings. Sundays were for packaging orders to ship. Nate would pack up Eli and take a bag of orders to the post office for me on Monday during his lunch break. Talk about no balance! Eventually it became obvious that the business could equal what I was making by working my day job, so I decided to take the dive that I had wanted to for so long. In May 2012, with an eleven-month-old son and an even younger small business, I quit my full-time job.

Look at this adorable little cherub!

Amy Richardson

The summer was a whirlwind. A week after my last day, I loaded Eli, my mother, and a few totes of product into our Toyota Yaris and headed to Philadelphia, where I split a booth with another friend and maker at the Art Star Craft Bazaar handmade market. Around the same time, Little Hip Squeaks was featured on the blog Cool Mom Picks—a boost that kicked the brand into another gear. My friend and I split another booth in June, at the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn, and I was shocked to find myself getting more traffic than her—after all, this was her third year of business and for me it hadn’t even been a year. At home, I had to amend my Etsy shop notes to make sure people understood that I was a one-woman show so it could be a month or more until they got their item. That didn’t dissuade our customers.

When I decided to do Little Hip Squeaks full time, the idea was that I would be able to watch my son during the day and work in the afternoons and evenings. We thought we’d say goodbye to his nanny after about a month or so. But one month became two, then three, and eventually, it became obvious that the business was building momentum to the point where I was going to need to add staff, not subtract it. However busy I was, though, I decided that I would always start my weekend on Fridays—even if I had to work harder the other four days—so that Eli and I could have quality time together.

In September 2012, I made my first hire: my indispensable do-it-all, Amy Boyle. My husband and I road-tripped from New York to Chicago to sell at another Renegade Craft Fair—in my own booth this time. On the way back, exhausted from the incredible response from Chicago moms, we decided that the one-bedroom wasn’t going to cut it anymore. So we located a three-bedroom place with the understanding that one room would be the home studio.

With space to breathe, things really started to get real. I decided to get out of the custom business and try to establish an inventory of products that I could easily pick and ship. Sewing was taking up too much of my time, so I looked around for some help, hiring freelance seamstresses around Brooklyn to pick up the slack.

Our brand has really been centered around creating basic pieces that mix and match well together.

Amanda Schwab

Looking back, it’s the decision to take the sewing out of my own hands that really set me down the path I’m on now. I never loved the actual sewing part. That’s what made my product handmade, of course, and for some people, that was a huge part of the value of the product I sold. But to me, it’s about building the community. I started this brand so that moms and dads would have options in picking out clothes for their kids beyond the same old stuff at every big-box store. With sewing off the table, so to speak, I had more time to focus on expanding our product line and positioning the brand the way I wanted it to be seen.

Tough Decisions

The business was at a critical juncture in the winter of 2012. I was adding overhead all the time—more seamstresses, more fabric, more Etsy fees. As I got farther away from the production, I realized that I needed to streamline it. The goal is always to be the steward and owner of the brand, and the more time I spent coordinating a complex supply chain, the more difficult that was.

The first step was finding a better fabric source. Our biggest customer complaint was that the fabric we were using would fade after several washes, leaving our vibrant and rich colors looking dull and worn. Spoonflower is meant for people in the position that I was at the beginning: those who are starting to explore a hobby and looking for a way to get their designs onto fabric quickly and easily. But with newfound room, I thought the time was right to aim higher. I located a fabric supplier and printer, both in California, then picked our most popular patterns and had them screen printed. The upgrade in quality was immediately apparent.

The next step was consolidating my production. As much as my husband and I enjoyed our odysseys across Brooklyn picking up a few dozen pieces here and there from freelancers, the scale available to me from the new fabric supplier meant I could begin production at a cut and sew shop in an actual factory! That would also ensure consistency in each piece. After consulting with a few other business owners, I found the perfect place; it was only forty blocks from my apartment and had enough space and staff to handle the big fabric orders.

The final step was to get away from Etsy and create my own website. Etsy is a valuable tool for small businesses, but I wanted to drive my customers to a site where I had curated the experience. We found a great developer and design team that were experienced in using Shopify’s software to build custom e-commerce sites and invested thousands in the new site and a rebrand. The official Little Hip Squeaks site was born in June 2013, only two years after I had wrapped my newborn son in my flagship product, a blanket, to bring him home.

Baby blankets were the first successful seller I had back in the day, and I love how they’ve evolved over the years!

Amy Richardson

One thing I’ve learned is that while your business is growing, one of the hardest things to do is maintain inventory to match the demand—especially when your social media following is growing quickly and you’re trying to forecast how many sales you’ll have six months ahead of time. I felt we had to keep product in stock so that customers weren’t coming to our website and being greeted by “out of stock” notifications. That’s not cheap—but I expected the extra stock to help us recoup costs faster.

But nothing really ever works out quite the way you draw it up. After the first few pickups from the manufacturer, my “spacious” home studio began to look smaller and smaller. Eventually, there was so much product all over the place that I had to bring it downstairs piecemeal to ship from our dining room table. The business had literally and metaphorically spilled over into my personal space. When I came home from doing something with the family, last night’s unshipped product greeted me. While I was upstairs answering customer service e-mails, I could hear Eli’s nanny downstairs, imploring him to stay out of our box of shipping pouches. The home-based business era had ended—and I was about to add more overhead.

A couple of blocks from my manufacturer was Industry City, a typical Brooklyn warehouse conversion project that was offering studios for artists and small businesses. In New York, there are few opportunities to get something at a reasonable cost. Industry City was raw and still under renovation (there was no elevator!), but it fit the bill. The cost was reasonable and the commute was short. Instead of being stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway for an hour, I could sneak up the road.

It was frightening to make the choice to leave my growing son behind daily to tend to my growing business, but I quickly learned there was nothing to be afraid of. Eli didn’t forget about me, and I learned the joy of coming home to an excited young man. I finally had the space to spread out and organize my product logically for the long days of shipping. I was even able to hire another young mama as a shipping coordinator because I had more room!

Instagram has had a massive effect on our brand’s success.

Amanda Schwab

New Goals

At the beginning of 2014, Little Hip Squeaks reached 30,000 Instagram followers. With the supply chain in a good place, I set a goal to expand the brand’s reach on that network to 100,000 by the following January. For the next few months, I was happily chugging along on that path, along with some other more fun projects. With 2013’s growing pains behind me, my husband and I began to talk seriously about having another baby. I was an only child growing up, and there were times when it was lonely. Meanwhile, my husband always had his three brothers to lend a hand: when we needed a place to stay or some help moving, they were there. I wanted Eli to have that.

Nate was reticent at first because of the stress associated with growing the business. But as 2014 went on, we reached a point where I felt that I could keep things going at the level they were for a while and have a baby before the gap between her and Eli would be too big. In June, we found out we were pregnant, due in January.

Pregnancy was completely different this time around. Instead of lugging myself on the subway to midtown Manhattan every day, I was sauntering up to the studio in my own car. Instead of sitting at a desk all day, I was active, shipping our packages while setting some stuff aside for myself. When we found out we were having a girl, the response was overwhelming from our customers. I had started the business because I felt cool clothes for boys were underavailable. That’s not true for little girls! I was inundated with suggestions and products that opened my eyes to the potential for a different approach to girls’ clothing—something less frilly and pink than average—which inspired pieces like our Hoodie Dress and Hoodie Playsuit.

Amy Richardson

After Juniper was born on January 3, I realized how different her life would be from her brother’s. Eli’s mom had a nine-to-five and a small side project, but Juniper’s mom and her brand were one and the same. Almost everything Juni had was a result of my immersion in this business, and the culture of small-batch kids’ products: the clothes, the stroller, the baby carrier, and the toys came from the great businesses I had connected with over the past three years.

Reaching a New Level

It wasn’t long after Juniper’s birth that I had to get back to the grind of managing the business. (Actually, I hopped on my laptop to send last-second e-mails in the time between when my water broke and contractions started, but I did take almost the entire time in the hospital to myself!) She came with me to the office, sleeping in a carrier on my chest while I tapped out e-mails and very occasionally sleeping in the pack and play.

Basic Blanket in dark mint.

Amy Richardson

The first crisis came when Juni was only three weeks old. Our manufacturer e-mailed that a big price increase was on the way. The business was about to change again. I located a new manufacturer . . . in Utah. Suddenly my product was 2,000 miles away instead of two blocks, but I had been thinking about third-party fulfillment for a long time—our big sale days, like Black Friday or when we launched a new season, were overwhelming to our tiny staff in Brooklyn. I found a company near the manufacturer that would ship all our products for us, allowing us in Brooklyn to focus our efforts on marketing and outreach. We moved into an office-style studio on the same floor, and our headquarters looked more like a software start-up than a haphazard retail warehouse.

At this point, the business had grown so far from the kitchen table that I thought it was time for a new name. Changing the name of a business is always contentious, but I wanted people we were reaching out to, such as celebrities and potential business partners, to view us as a mature brand. I’d worked so hard over the past four years to create a market for a product that I used every day myself. We have exceeded our 100,000 Instagram-follower goal and are now looking at other platforms to expand our reach. Our product is pictured in the pages of magazines on Haylie Duff’s and Kourtney Kardashian’s kids. “Little Hip Squeaks” just doesn’t seem to fit anymore.

I’m going to be so sad when my babies outgrow J&J! She was so tiny!

Amy Richardson

June & January is a description of my family: all of us were born in June except for June herself, who was born in January. (Clever, right?) It’s appropriate because the business itself is a part of our family. It grows organically, as we do. My hope is that thirty years from now, when I’m watching my grandkids play in the park, sporting our latest pieces, someone will tap me on the shoulder and ask: “Are you June & January?” And it will still be as flattering and amazing as it was the first time.

The colorful Fresh Baby Knotted Hats.

Amy Richardson

Oilo

oilostudio.com | oilo | @oilostudio | @OiloStudio | oilo | OILO

Annalisa Thomas

Does It Get Easier?

As I was walking out of a blogger event, a woman whom I’d never met stopped me in the parking lot. She looked me in the eye and said in weary tone, “Does it get easier?” The look in her eyes told me what she was referring to. I had been there too. It was the look of an exhausted new business owner. The enormous stress and pressure was building, and she needed a glimpse of hope. Would this feeling ever end?

It’s in My Genes

Before I started Oilo, I worked for a manufacturing company in the small appliance industry. I started out as an entry-level graphic designer just as the company began to experience phenomenal growth by taking on mass-market retailers like Target, Wal-Mart, and Macy’s. As the company grew over the next five years, so did I, rising through the ranks to become one of the lead art directors and learning a great deal about manufacturing, branding, and managing projects and employees.

And yet, despite my early success in the corporate world, I always knew it wasn’t for me.

I wanted to own my own business. My grandfather had started his own business. My father had started his own business. It was almost like I didn’t know anything else, like it was the thing I was supposed to do, and my current career was just a stepping-stone until I knew what kind of company I wanted to run.

About a year before we had our first baby, my husband, Clayton, and I decided to go to Maui for one last hurrah before having kids. While there, I saw a street sign that said Oilo (which I cannot find via Google maps or in person when we’ve gone back, so maybe I’m crazy). I told my husband I loved how short the name was and how different it sounded, and that when I started a business, I would name it Oilo (pronounced oil-oh). So that night, back at the hotel, I purchased the domain www.oilostudio.com. I still had no idea what I would do with Oilo Studio, but it was a start and, deep down, it felt right.

Shortly after that trip, we got pregnant with our first baby. We were thrilled, and I (like every other new mom) couldn’t wait to start decorating our nursery. I was shocked to find there weren’t a lot of modern baby products on the market. There were primarily character-filled or sport-themed products with bright primary colors or frilly pinks. That was when I realized what Oilo Studio could offer—baby bedding. I could fill this void! Of course I was super excited, but my job was so demanding that I put the idea on the back burner.

Our family of five.

Britt Anderson

On Top of the World, for a Minute

Life couldn’t have been better. My husband’s job was solid in the construction industry, which was booming; my career was going great; I was pregnant; and we were just finishing building the home we would raise our family in. As an added bonus, we had tucked away a lot of money into savings.

When our house was completed, lenders were throwing money at us. They were telling us we had so much equity in our new house that we should get a second mortgage to put in a yard, buy a new car, or go on a vacation. We were shocked. Why did they want us to go into debt for such frivolous reasons? Shortly thereafter, the economy started showing major signs of distress.

During this time, my husband was also building a spec home. Within weeks, rumors began floating around that lending was getting tight. We started to really worry about selling our spec home. We decided we should hurry and get a loan on it and start renting it out. Only six weeks had passed since the surreal experience of closing on our own home—where money was essentially being thrown at us. Despite the fact that our spec home floor plan was identical to our current home and only a few miles away, we barely got a loan. They said the house was already underwater by $100,000. At this point it was official—the economy was in free fall. In 2008, we were entering the worst economic slump the United States had experienced since the Great Depression. We were left with a new home, a spec home turned rental home, and a baby on the way.

Because of the economy, there were also a lot of changes going on at my job.

Right before the market crashed, the company had been sold to a larger company. With sales rapidly declining and an uncertain outlook, they were closing the Salt Lake City office and pressuring me to relocate to their headquarters in Wisconsin. Although it offered stability in very unstable times, this job was not what I really wanted. If we moved to Wisconsin, I knew that I would never take the risk of starting Oilo. So I stayed in Salt Lake City, and they agreed to let me work remotely until they found a replacement. It was time to bring Oilo to the forefront.

I started sketching fabric patterns at night. I had a million ideas in my head and couldn’t get them on paper fast enough. Because of my graphic design background, I was able to create digital mock-ups. My excitement was reignited! This was it; my time had finally come. I talked to my mom about my idea, and she agreed to help with Oilo. She was driven, loved design, and had more than twenty-five years of interior design experience. Together, we would be unstoppable.

That year, I officially left my job, had my first baby, designed a line of new fabrics, and started researching the top trade shows at which to unveil our new products. My research kept pointing us to the ABC Kids Expo in Las Vegas—the largest business-to-business trade show in the children’s products industry. That autumn, we drove to Las Vegas and walked the show. There were baby products everywhere—all aimed at retailers.

It was exactly what we were looking for.

Getting Started with a Little Help

Next, we needed to find someone to make our products, so we started researching again. There was a textile show in Los Angeles that seemed like it would be a good place to find fabric suppliers. Our instincts were right. There, we met a textile company that not only sold fabric but printed on the fabric as well. They were great people and helped us find a fabulous sewing room in California. That sewing room then gave us contacts for packaging, pillow inserts, zipper manufacturers, etc. Within a few short months, we had a handful of suppliers to help get our company off the ground. There is an interesting lesson to be learned here: it only took one contact, the textile printing company, to get started. From there, it was like a web of resources, each company leading us to another. While using this tactic, I quickly learned that you shouldn’t be scared to ask your suppliers questions or for additional (noncompeting) contacts. Our suppliers were on our team. They wanted us to succeed, as it meant more business for them.

A peek at our first trade show booth.

Annalisa Thomas

On the last day of the textile show, we went to a nearby café to grab breakfast. While we were eating, a woman approached us and remarked that she had seen us at the show. After chatting a bit, we learned she was selling baby carriers and had recently exhibited at the ABC show for the first time. She was so kind to give us a few pointers, including what pavilion we needed to exhibit in to make our first trade show the most worthwhile, but more than anything, it solidified the fact that the ABC show really was the place to get our products into the retailers’ hands.

When we got home from the textile show, we signed up for the 2009 ABC Kids Expo. We went in with the “go big or go home” mentality, so we got a big space—twenty by twenty feet. The economy was still at an all-time low and banks weren’t lending, so we applied for an American Express card, which funded our first trade show booth and product samples. With my husband’s project management skills, my mom’s keen eye, my dad’s building skills, my brother’s electrical skills, and my graphic design background, it looked fairly professional for a first-time booth. We had so much support from our family and friends, one of whom was my former boss. He knew the manufacturing lingo a lot better than I did, so when we started getting questions about MAP pricing, insurance, case packs, etc., he was there to step in.

While at the show, I reconnected with the woman I met at the café during the textile show. I had noticed on her website that she had been featured in many large magazines, including People, Real Simple, and Us Weekly. She said an industry friend had connected her with an amazing publicist and then shared the contact with us.

The ABC show was essentially the beginning of Oilo. We walked out of that show with a highly recommended publicist and a stack of orders. We were thrilled! The sky was the limit, even during such a dark economic time. When we got home, however, the harsh reality of funding hit. We needed money to make all these orders—and not just a little bit. With all the orders we had taken—and minimum printing requirements—we needed close to a million dollars. We now knew people liked what they saw, but we would never be able to fulfill all the orders. So we took the orders and narrowed them down to the top four patterns ordered. We decided to launch the first two in January and the next two in the spring.

We applied for a few more credit cards and put some of our savings into the business to fund our first production run.

I learned another important lesson here. Had we had an investor with deep pockets, we probably would have printed far more patterns and colors than we could handle. More isn’t always better, and in our fragile, inexperienced state, our limitations were definitely a blessing, as we quickly learned managing a few products was quite challenging.

Managing the Unexpected

We had never printed fabric before, but the printer we had found at the textile show in Los Angeles was so kind and held our hand the whole way. Soon we were approving samples and ready for the real print run. Then one night, I couldn’t sleep, so I checked my e-mail on my phone and saw an e-mail from our textile printer: the company was declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy and all communication would be cut off, effective immediately. My heart sank. I turned on the light, woke my husband, and cried. We had worked so hard and put so much into this business, and now, just weeks from our ship date, not only did we not have fabric, but we had to start completely over. We would have to find a new textile printer, send art files, get screens made (which alone can take up to six weeks), and then do the back and forth to approve colors again. My husband held me tight that night. He was so concerned, you would have thought this was happening to him. That night, I knew that he not only supported Oilo one hundred percent but that he would someday run the business.

When my kids were tiny, they would run around playing while we worked. Boxes, to them, meant hours of hide and seek, boats, forts, cars, or anything else they could dream of.

Annalisa Thomas

The next morning, my mom, Clayton, and I called every contact we had in the industry, which wasn’t many. We didn’t know a single other textile printer, and Google was absolutely no help. Fortunately, we were able to reach a couple of the employees that had been let go by the previous textile printer. They explained to us that they had gone to work to find the whole building chained up. Despite their unfortunate circumstances, they unselfishly encouraged us to keep going. They believed in us and gave us their competitors’ names. Within days, we were printing again. We were four weeks late launching our first products, but each of the retailers had been very understanding because they had seen firsthand what the economy was doing to small businesses across the country. This closure of that textile company taught us a very important lesson, and it’s the reason Oilo always has three suppliers for each of its product lines—whether it’s lighting, furniture, or textiles.

Before we knew it, product was shipping to our house, and we were packing box after box and shipping them all over the country. Our publicist also started telling the world about Oilo. We didn’t have a sales team, and we didn’t need one. We already had more orders than we could handle, and I give credit to our publicist. Soon we were showing up in People, Us Weekly, Real Simple, and on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. It didn’t stop. We were everywhere; we were the new up-and-coming company that everyone was talking about.

Annalisa Thomas

Managing Growth

Things were going great. Clayton quit his job to work for the company full-time, and we added a few employees. But we still didn’t have money, even though it may have looked like it on paper. We were selling a lot, but we couldn’t keep up. At one point, our bank (who denied us a business loan) kindly told us that if we kept up this rate of growth, we would be out of business in six months. It was another harsh reality check. How could we go out of business when we had so many orders? But it was true. We were getting more and more orders every month, and our cash flow couldn’t sustain the demand. People think this is a great problem to have, but it is a problem—and a big one at that. Retailers have to fill their shelves to sell product and make money, so if you can’t fulfill orders, your retailers will find someone else who will.

So we did the thing no one wants to do—take a step backward. In order to manage our growth, we stopped taking on new retailers, which also meant skipping a year at the ABC show. We spent a lot of time strategizing and reassessing Oilo’s needs so that we could build a solid foundation for our company to stand on instead of flying by the seat of our pants.

I’ll be the first to admit that taking a step back wasn’t nearly as fun as growing at rocket speed, but I can see now that it was the best decision we ever made. We were able to better support our top-selling retailers while also preparing Oilo for the bigger retailers we hoped to get into one day. For us, preparing for larger retailers meant putting UPC codes on all our products. We got EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), and we implemented software to help manage our inventory. We also brought on bigger suppliers that would be better equipped to manage large orders. We worked hard to strengthen our brand so that it aligned with that of the retailers we were seeking.

We redesigned our website, started blogging regularly, and started to market heavily via social media.

In 2013, Nordstrom—the retailer we had been seeking since Oilo began—called us out of the blue to see if we would be interested in selling our products in their stores. We nearly died! We acted cool and calm on the phone, but once we hung up, everyone started screaming and jumping up and down. We did it! Nordstrom wanted us.

Setting up with a nationwide retailer takes a lot of time, but in January of 2015, we were officially in Nordstrom. It gave our brand another boost of credibility and opened doors to Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, and many more high-end retailers. In addition, other high-end brands started approaching us to see if we would be interested in co-branding with them.

Our first big order filled a container. We were still shipping out of our home, so we called my brothers to help load the shipment into the semitruck since we didn’t have a forklift.

Annalisa Thomas

Oilo’s story obviously doesn’t end there. In the fall of 2015, we attended our industry’s largest trade show in the world in Cologne, Germany, so that we could begin distributing our product worldwide. There are many more pages in Oilo’s book, but as I write about its beginning days, I can’t help but notice how blessed we have been. The “blood, sweat, and tears” cliché could not be truer, but each of the struggles Oilo has faced has made us wiser, stronger, and more stable. I also know, without a doubt, that if we had been given a large chunk of money via investors or other resources, Oilo would not be here today. We were young and made a lot of mistakes, but we were very, very cautious with our money because resources were limited.

When my husband came on full-time, the company was growing like crazy. But we were still scrimping and saving. We didn’t take a paycheck for another two and a half years, only paying employees and not ourselves. When we finally did take a paycheck, it was just to cover our mortgage. But ever so slowly, all those pennies saved and additional minor funding sources started to equate to a warehouse full of inventory.

So for those who are starting a business and want everything done now. Don’t do it! There is wisdom, strength, and stability for those who are patient.

This was our first co-brand with another company. Babyhome, a company from Spain, used our fabric for their product.

Nick Bayless