We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lindsay Hagerman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lindsay below.

Hi Lindsay, thanks for joining us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

Hiring a team for a small business is always a challenge. We have hired through a local independent recruiter, done it ourselves through Indeed domestically and internationally, and through word-of-mouth. Some of those team members are still with us years later, and some were spectacularly bad mismatches. The most successful employees are the ones who feel that our job description is engaging and compelling, and they can picture themselves working here. An additional challenge is that when we are stretched too thin and deeply need a new team member is usuall the same time that we don’t have time to dedicate to an attentive hiring process followed by a good strong onboarding.

Lindsay, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

RainCaper was co-founded by Jan Hartman & Lindsay Hagerman, a mother-daughter duo with decades of experience owning an independent gift store in the Philadelphia suburbs. After closing the store, we decided to develop travel & gift products that merged function with beauty. Jan heads product development, and is proud to bring a touch of extra to every RainCaper item. You’ll find the artist’s signature inside our mugs, a quote printed inside our journals, a border detail to accentuate the rest of the design, and extra pockets in our tote bags. We are delighted to collaborate with a number of museums to bring new products to our customers.

Our extensive background in retail informs many of our company’s business and product decisions. We create descriptive beautiful retail packaging. One if the practices that supports our stores that we are most proud of is our stock rebalance program. This offer allows stores to try something out of their comfort zone and know that we’ll take an exchange if it doesn’t work out. We offer this generously and, incredibly, stores rarely have to call us to send product back that they cannot sell.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Trick question – I met my mom and business partner at birth! I began to work in her independent gift store in middle school, and worked for her off and on until I was in my 30s, when I became a Store Manager and handled website sales on two platforms. In EOS parlance, Jan is our Visionary and I am the Integrator, and we complement each other extremely well along our company’s roadmap.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We do sell e-commerce! In retail, we sell on our website www.raincaper.com on the Shopify platform, on Etsy, and on Amazon. Shopify is regarded as the easiest platform to deal with. Every good app and tool plugs into it, there is little need for an ongoing developer, and everything just *works*. Etsy is a more elementary platform that is not right for every business. Amazon is a beast that treats sellers extremely poorly, with impossible policies and eye-popping fees. The policies that Amazon has implemented benefit Amazon and have literally rewritten entire parts of our industry. Yet it’s the #1 search engine in the USA and most brands feel that they cannot afford to *not* sell on Amazon.

On the wholesale side, we sell on Faire marketplace and have a wholesale website, both of which feed into our company’s ERP.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.raincaper.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/raincapers
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/raincapers
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/raincaper
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@raincaper4222