Chapter 2: My Life In Business – Road Tripping (2004)

My life as Co-Founder of Thirty-One

20 chapters from my 20 years

Including never before shared stories

The first full year in business for Thirty-One was 2004. Personally, I was getting the hang of being a new mommy and figuring out how to balance family, work and this new business that was gaining steam. I would define 2004 as one of transition from working on Thirty-One part time to making it a full-time focus. As well as it being a year of traveling. It was the first time we attended a big direct sales conference (DSA, Chicago).

It was also a busy year as we traveled to no less than 10 trade shows and gift markets. In the early days we bought product from the AmericasMart in Atlanta, one of the largest wholesale gift and home markets in the world with shopping space covering over seven million square feet. Talk about an exhausting shopping trip! Looking back at the product selection we offered in our early days, it’s fun to see what products we were excited to sell: food products, baby products, raw silk purses, BBQ sets, beach bags and lots of other items.

Our first consultant meeting of the year was on Feb 2nd and we met with all four of our consultants. Yes, I said four. We gathered around the dining table with three of the consultants with the forth one on speaker phone. We excitedly served them a selection of the new food product line – She Crab Soup, Cornbread and Pluff Mud Pie – before telling them these items were part of the product line. The mixed reaction was not what we expected, but if you don’t try things you never know if they will work out. The food line didn’t serve us well in the end. We didn’t sell a whole lot of it and we learned a lot about selling perishable items.

We showed our consultants the basement area where we had set up operations for the business. It really just consisted of a family room space and a guest bedroom sized room without a large opening between the two spaces rather than a narrow doorway. That was the extent of the space we utilized for running the business. We look lunch breaks upstairs in the kitchen so we could get out of the basement for a while. Along with the creative use of the garage and hallway for storage, we were making the space work.

When we needed to take product photos we took advantage of the outdoor space around the house along with the upstairs living areas. There are countless shots in our early catalogs that we had photographed around the house where the basement startup story began. Eventually the house returned to being a home and we would move out of the basement into a leased office space, but that would come later. We were not in position yet with the business to leave our full time jobs, but in late February I was laid off from a job I had enjoyed for the last five years. Instead of going from one full time job to another, I decided to take some time to put 100% of my focus on Thirty-One. This ended up being a blessing as I never did need to get another job after that day. God provided day after day through all the struggles and triumphs.

The day after I was laid off and the realization set in that with my newly flexible schedule we could actually attend our first Direct Selling Association conference event. Less than a week later we were boarding a plane to Chicago. The first morning of the event included a breakfast hosted by the area Direct Selling companies – Pampered Chef, At Home America and Weekenders USA. We got to spend time talking with Doris Christopher, the founder of Pampered Chef. We participated in some panel discussions, toured the home office of Pampered Chef and Weekenders. The most impactful thing was definitely seeing the Pampered Chef offices and operations in person. Their space was huge and they had so many employees. Would that be us some day?

The road show tour of trade shows and gift markets started in April with three events, then continued with a series of fall events from Sept - Nov. We traveled to women-focused trade shows where 30,000+ people walked through the doors at each event. We had a 10x10’ booth space where we could display our products, gather names, phone numbers and email addresses with door prize slips, and overall just focus on getting leads to grow our business. We set up our booth display at trade shows in Nashville, Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte, Birmingham, Jacksonville and Mobile. In addition we did at least three local gift markets around Chattanooga. By the end of September we had 24 consultants and had hired our first employee, Cathy. We definitely needed the help and she could step in and help wherever she was needed. What a blessing.

In our early days the option for personalizing items with embroidery was available on some items, but we didn't have any indication how big the embroidery side of the business would one day be for the company. We didn't own an embroidery machine so we drove our products back and forth to a town about 45 minutes away to a shop where they would add the personalization for us. It was a time consuming process to coordinate each order to be personalized when we had to take them to someone else to do the work, so we knew we'd want to get our own embroidery machine as soon as we could manage.

The holidays were our busiest time of the year and we packed up orders and hand delivered them right up to the last possible minute. Having made it through a full year we were more motivated than ever to keep going. We had something special in the works and we knew it.

Some things I learned during the first full year in business:

Success in business takes time. By that I mean longer days and later nights working on anything and everything that needs to be done. There will never be a feeling of being caught up. You’ll feel like a hamster on a wheel, but even if you don’t see it you really are making progress. And that progress with be well worth it.

Success in business takes energy. If the long work hours don’t wear you out, the traveling will. There will be times when you feel like you need to be in three (or more) places at once. Slowing down and taking breaks isn’t easy but is necessary. Even if it’s just taking time to have fun on the front end of back end of a work trip. Make it matter.

Success in business takes sacrifice. Your time spent with family and friends will be less than you’d like. You’ll look back fondly on the crazy early years in business but you’ll also have feelings of regret for things you missed. You will wonder if you made the right decisions along the way. But remember to keep those who matter the most to you close and never let business become the most important thing.