This week’s featured Mompreneur is Kristen, one of Zazzle’s incredibly talented independent designers and mom of one-year-old Alex. Kristen’s flourishing design business, Redwood & Vine, is relatively new, having begun it just last summer at the tail end of her five-month maternity leave. Yet, in that short time, she has counted over 6,000 items on Zazzle that have featured her ubiquitous designs, such as invitations and stationary, mouse pads and cellphone cases, t-shirts, tank tops and other apparel, products for babies, kids, and pets, and a variety of accessories for home, office, and travel. She even has a specialized line of holiday items.
Kristen didn’t start out professionally as a designer but began her career in corporate retail operations before moving into the management consulting industry, working both the client service and marketing sides of the business. She climbed the corporate ladder for twelve years and anticipated staying with the company until retirement, however her maternity leave ended with an unexpected career shift. “When I was home with Alex I had the idea of designing a baby onesie with something funny on it,” she told me. It didn’t work out the way she wanted, but it ended up changed her professional trajectory in a direction she never could have foreseen. “I always loved art as a kid,” Kristen recounted while sipping coffee from a mug whose outer design she created, “but I never pursued it.” Zazzle changed everything for her.
Kristen discovered Zazzle 4 years ago when she searched for custom wedding postage and reconnected with the company when she was looking for where to best create the onesies. However, she saw a bigger opportunity with Zazzle and her vision expanded. Here Kristen found a ‘print on demand’ marketplace of independent designers where she could upload her designs onto one of any two hundred fifty product types (such as t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, invitations, etc.). She explained that the beauty of working with Zazzle is that all she has to do is submit her designs along with her marketing description and Zazzle takes care of the rest – manufacturing, printing, shipping, and payment collection. In turn, Kristen receives a royalty every time an item sells with her design.
It only took Kristen a week to become addicted to this new platform. She would design the product, upload it, and instantly start selling. Shocked by the response of her sales she felt encouraged and motivated to continue to pursue this passion hobby even after she returned to work, and now it is a full fledge business.
“The design part of my work has always been a side thing because my background is really business,” Kristen mentions. However, when you walk through Kristen’s door, she clearly has aesthetic sensibility because her home is stylishly decorated, with every detail thought-out. Still, she was always passionate about design and dabbled in projects on the side as a way to fill her soul’s need for creativity. Her previous passion project, for example, was one of the first big beauty blogs created, Beauty Addict, which she wrote for several years. In fact it became so big that her picture appeared more than once in the style section of the New York Times, something that she says ‘floored her’ when she actually saw it. In addition, Kristen covered fashion week several times. Meeting makeup artists and models backstage. She was eager about it and was able to make some money from advertising on the side. Kristen established a huge following from the success of her blog. However, this all changed with the popular growth with the YouTube gurus. That caused Kristen’s creative outlet to be dormant until Alex woke it up with his birth when she had more time at home during maternity leave.
Kristen’s previous job allowed her flexibility to continue to work from home as she had intended to return and get a nanny to care for Alex full time. Especially, since she felt quite unprepared to embrace motherhood. She was not prepared for, however, the actual adjustment to the transition that followed, and like most mothers, you are completely out of it during the first few months. Kristen recalls when Alex was 3 months old what another mom said, and looking back she realized that the statement was so true. “When you have a baby, some part of you shakes loose. And you don’t know where it’s going to take you.”
Despite the exciting growth of her business and the conscious decision to nurture it, it was not easy for Kristen to leave the career she invested 12 years of her life building. With the transition at home and the changes at work, Kristen found it to be an opportunity to exit her job and fully embrace her new journey with Zazzle.
Kristen has found so much joy sharing her work with people from around the world that it enhanced their life knowing that the 5,000 sales so far are being cherished in homes everywhere, whether it’s an invitation that they used to share the celebration of a wedding or birthday, a mug to enjoy their cup of coffee in the morning, or a shirt that helps them feel better about themselves. Any of those things will create a smile on someone’s face when they get their shipment in the mail.
It is definitely more fun to design products you yourself would enjoy purchasing. “Would I use this invitation for my friend or put this phone case on my own phone? Would I wear this t shirt or put this one on my son?” Kristen designs, writes, and promotes what instinctively feels good to her, which is the best way to express yourself organically.
In operating a business, there are useful tools and resources for organization structure that has helped her accomplishments. Kristen and I have a mutual friend photo shop, and as a multi-tasker she typically has 50 million tabs open at the same time, which she fears will be catastrophic when photo shop crashes with 8 million things open in it because she is not good at organizing files, saving, closing. When Kristen is in a creative mode, she wants to focus on her project and worry about the ‘clearing of her space’ later. However, with a dog and a child, things get knocked over, and sometimes you lose everything you have been working on.
Most people who rely on their computer for work, values the need for automatic backup. However, as a business owner, these are things you have to setup yourself, unless you have a husband like Kristen’s who is an engineer. She finds that it’s super helpful to marry engineers who can assist in this department, so it’s one less thing she has to worry about. Kristen also relies heavily on her calendar and google drive because it helps keep her organized.
An extremely important tool to help with marketing business are social media platforms, where Kristen actively engages with her clients. You can find her on various platforms, such as Pinterest and Instagram, which are perfect for visual media that focus on product and design because it shows them off. If you are looking for some sweet discounts and featured products, you can also find Kristen on twitter sharing products discount codes. Thanks to Kristen’s previous engagements on social media, she has been able to leverage those followers to her current business, such as her Beauty Addict audience to her Pinterest fans who gravitated to her epic wedding boards.
Kristen feels it is important to use the various platforms for different audiences from different channels and present yourself in different way. Twitter is fast moving so it’s good for flash sales, showing discount codes. People comb through looking for sales and coupon codes, while Instagram is good for sharing shots from the wild and styled shots and the products your friend has recently purchased from your store.
When Kristen is not working, she enjoys spending time with her one year old son, Alex and her husband John, whom she’s known since childhood. They were family friends even though she is from New York and he is from New Jersey, but when they started dating John was living in Hawaii, which is what brought Kristen out there. In reflection, now that they live in Napa, they realized they like to live where people like to vacation as they seem to have summer guests yearly.
When Kristen is not hosting house guests, her daily schedule starts with breakfast, play and hangout time with Alex, checking her over-night sales, and then heading up to her office. Kristen’s favorite furniture in her office space would be her couch in case she was in need of a siesta. Her office space is also a great for spending quality time with Barkly while Alex is napping. Alex is such a sweet and relaxed baby that he will play while she’s working, and they are each doing their thing while hanging out together. When it’s a beautiful day, Kristen takes breaks so they go on walks, to the park, and just decompress. However, when Alex does nap, she gets time to do the work that requires undisturbed focus and concentration.
As a family routine, both Kristen and John try to stop working around 5 pm if he is also working from home, so they can meet downstairs for wine o’clock. However, the downside to working from home is peeling yourself from work at a reasonable hour. It is easy to work every day where the days roll into one another and sometimes you don’t get the day right. It’s certainly a goal to get to point of not working on weekends, but when you first start a business, it is difficult using time properly because you’re so enthusiastic about getting everything going. It’s hard not to work when you feel that there’s so much to be done that work somehow finds its way into the evening where Kristen will be checking on the tasks left over from the day. It’s a constant challenge to let things go and accept the feeling of not being done at the end of the day. The upside of entrepreneurship is that she doesn’t feel the ‘Sunday night pressure’ that she experienced in her previous corporate life when she thought about her performance for the following week. Working from home also encouraged her to stop tracking her hours because it caused more anxiety to track productivity based on time. It use to leave her feeling terrible whether she was working 15 hours or only 3.
Work over load is inevitable as a mompreneur and the need to make more time for self-care becomes pertinent. Sometimes Kristen finds that she might have gone through a whole week and haven’t done one thing for herself. Whether it is a manicure, face scrub, having wine lunch, champagne in the day, as long as the activity makes one happy. The definition of self-care is different for everyone as Kristen learned from various conflicting advisors when she had Alex, but what she found worked best was to establish a routine that makes you feel normal, something as simples as taking a shower every morning. She believes having a routine will help you feel like a person. It takes time with a newborn, but now that Alex is one it is easier to take some time out to feel more balanced with a business.
When asked what words of advice Kristen would offer, she encourages you to find your own path. It is okay to listen to other people’s advice but don’t necessarily take it. What works for one doesn’t work for another, but she encourages moms to get out of your comfort zone and try something different. The expression “to stay in your lane,” has become one of those popular hashtags that Kristen finds can stop you from living your potential. She believes that people will limit themselves if they stay in their lane where instead they can expand and discover new experiences that could change their life. Friends have said that Kristen has made a brave choice by leaving her job to pursue her passion, but she believes you need to find the inspiration and go for it. She encourages people to do what they love and not think it’s just a pipe dream. “It takes gumption. Don’t stay in one lane. Change lanes, see how it goes, your lane will still be there if you need to move back into it. Don’t burn bridges.“
Website: http://www.zazzle.com/redwoodandvine
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/redwoodandvine
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/redwoodandvine/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/redwoodandvine