Chapter 1: My Life In Business – The Beginning (2003)

My life as Co-Founder of Thirty-One

20 chapters from my 20 years

Including never before shared stories

In 2003 my life went in a totally unexpected direction that would become a 20 year life-altering journey. At the time I was a young wife to Jason and a mom to a precious baby girl named Jordan. I was a recent college graduate with a comfortable job at a marketing and advertising firm. As was tradition, we had sent out birth announcements after the arrival of our sweet girl in 2003. Here is the actual birth announcement we mailed out to friends and family. Wasn't she just the cutest baby?!?

That simple action kicked off a sequence of events that would lead to my role in the founding of Thirty-One. I share the story of how it all started in my blog post titled “Juggling Motherhood and A New Business”. Be sure and check it out, along with the considerations I suggest you think about before starting your own business, if that is something you feel led to do.

When I say I wasn’t looking to be a business owner and didn’t have any idea what it would take, I’m being totally honest. Business strategy, planning and implementation were foreign concepts to me. I’ll be the first to say that there were some major missteps along the way during the early years and by God’s grace we made it through despite ourselves. Business strategy and planning would eventually become part of my daily vocabulary but that’s not how it started. From the outside I’m sure it looked like we had no chance of succeeding. I didn’t fully see the big picture at the beginning, and honestly didn’t know if the business would be successful at all. With all of the reasons I could have come up with to not get involved in starting a new business, I still took my responsibilities very seriously. Once I say I’m going to do something, there’s no stopping me until I get it done. That’s just a characteristic that I’ve been grateful to have had instilled in me early on.

From day one in business it was stressful for me because of the circumstances of life - a 6 month old baby, a new (to us) house, a day job, just to name a few. I felt God leading me through this for a reason. I was committed to the business but was really looking ahead about a month at a time because anything else just seemed to be more than I could handle. Until later in the business when it became necessary to plan further ahead, I can say it was a blessing not to have any idea what was actually coming down the road.

We launched the company with a printed catalog in October and a e-commerce website went live in November. The struggles of getting those things put into place quickly resulted in some late nights and long weekends from the beginning. The fact we were a direct sales business that launched with a website from the start was a big deal in 2003. Many companies had to create new processes to take their business online, but we were able to start off in the right direction because of our timing and the value we placed on technology. Email marketing and in-person selling was all we had to work with at the time. Social media was not a thing yet. Facebook was launched in early 2004 but even then we didn’t jump on the social media thing right away. Our business was nothing without sales consultants who shared our products with friends and family through home parties. The consultants received a percentage of the total product sales once they turned in the order to us through our website. The consultant worked with a home party hostess and as the party was submitted using a “hostess worksheet” that was emailed in to us. It was a rudimentary excel file that tallied what the person who hosted the home party event would earn for their effort and as a thank you for opening their home. We also calculated the commissions earned through that excel file. We only had a handful of consultants in the early months so until we grew to larger numbers our basic process had to get us by.

Our business meetings with our local consultants happened in person around a dining table. The consultants were all local at the beginning and we simply added seats to the table as more joined. The foundation of being a basement start-up with no investors or seed money made for some challenging times. We launched that first catalog with products we bought wholesale at market in quantities of a dozen or so at a time. In 2003 we weren’t actually working in the basement all that much. I was still working full time and working on the business from my house in the evenings. The weekends were our time to work on unpacking inventory, gather supplies, pack up orders and hand deliver the items to the hostesses or consultants. The orders didn’t come in unless we found more consultants who could connect with hostesses and their friends and family. The days were long and the rewards were few at the beginning, but something kept us going and I’m so grateful we didn’t give up.

We were in business for the last four months of 2003. I'll end this post by sharing my journal entries from those early days:

September 3, 2003

With this Thirty-One stuff going on I was resigned to the idea that we would not get the house sold. I am thrilled it finally sold, but Jason and I have so much to do in the next 30 days. We have to get the catalog to print, get the website done, buy a house and get moved!

Jordan is 32 weeks old and will be just about walking by the time we move. What a crazy time to have this happen.

October 3, 2003

Today was the official start of business for Thirty-One. We had a space at Signal Mountain Hodge Podge craft festival. We sold $1200 worth of products and still have Saturday left to go. We handed out over 200 catalogs and got several leads for shows.

October 4, 2003

The Hodge Podge is over and our total earnings were over $2,000. It was a great start! We have our first home show on Tuesday. Yeah!

October 8, 2003

Last night was Thirty-One's first home party. Just three orders were placed but we expect some additional orders to come through.

October 15, 2003

Thirty-One business is going well. Tomorrow is the two-week anniversary of the start of the business and we have sold $2,335 in products.

December 3, 2003

We got our first outside customer order on the new website. It's so exciting to do something fun like this.

December 17, 2003

We've sold around $10,000 in products since Oct 3!