We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Renee O’Dell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Renee, appreciate you joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

How we came to the name Pep & Punch for our boutique is probably the question we are asked the most. When we were in the early stages of planning, we wanted a lifestyle boutique, something for everyone, later we figured out that just wasn’t feasible with our modest 900 sqft sales floor. However, you don’t know what you don’t know so I was looking for a name that reflected lifestyle or life in general. I happened to look up synonyms for “life” and oddly enough pep and punch were both on the list. Obviously those are more adjectives, “she has a lot of pep, this has a lot of punch to it,” but I felt they described seasons in life well. Life tends to be about peaks and valleys, sometimes you’re at the top and full of pep and other times you’re at your lowest and have to punch through it. The alliteration of the two was a total bonus.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hi, I’m Renee O’Dell a wife, mom of two, daughter, sister, friend and co-owner of Pep & Punch. In the winter of 2019 I was in a major season shift in life, I was a first time mom with a newborn on maternity leave from teaching. There were so many late nights during that time either feeding, pumping or just insomnia, which provided a lot of time to think. During one of those late nights, I really started to reflect on how I wanted more time with our son, I didn’t want to be drained at the end of the day from all of the time, energy, and patience the classroom requires. I didn’t love the idea of having to place our son in childcare and I envisioned myself being the very present mom at all of the school activities once he started school. I knew I wouldn’t retire from a career in teaching and wanted more for our family, I just didn’t know what else I wanted to do and I was content in the classroom, but this new season lit a fire in me to figure out what the next stage was going to be.

At the time, my husband, a local real estate broker, had a listing just a mile and a half from our home, that had an incredible amount of potential. I continuously told him how cute it could be, he just needed the right buyer, because the place did need a lot of work to make it aesthetically pleasing for any future business. The little house could be seen from a major highway that runs through our town, the location was solid and the price was reasonable. I could not understand why no one was interested, but even my husband struggled with seeing the potential. During one of those late nights of mine, I went into a complete spiral of thoughts of what a lovely boutique the property could make and all of the items/brands that the two established boutiques in town at the time did not carry, but would be well received in our community. I also wanted a redemption opportunity.

In my very early 20s, my parents purchased a business on my behalf, that would quickly become a catastrophic failure. There are multiple reasons for the failure the two biggest; the reported business evaluation upon purchasing was not anywhere close to accurate and I didn’t know what I was doing running a business at 23 years old. I truly felt I had learned from that failure, a lot of what not to do, but eyes wide open on what I should have been doing and would need to do in any future business ventures. Once again, I went to my incredibly supportive parents, this time with an actual business plan laid out and 10 additional years of life experience, to ask them to be my financial partners.

I will spare you all the details from roughly March 2019-October 2019, but here is a brief summary: purchased the property with potential, resigned from teaching, unfortunately lost my dad to cancer, my mom unexpectedly moved here and became more than a silent partner of Pep & Punch, gutted and renovated the newly purchased property and opened Pep & Punch October 8, 2019.

Pep & Punch has come a very long way since 2019, a lot of that we can attribute to Covid, and that’s a genuine sentiment. With only having our doors open for 5 months before the world shut down, we didn’t know what we didn’t know and ignorance was bliss, we had never experienced a Spring/Summer prior to Covid, we didn’t know what we were missing out on and we thought sales were great! Covid forced us to focus on our brand and the brands we wanted to carry or could carry for that matter. All in all, Covid expedited decisions that were going to be inevitable for our business.

As you can see from the creation of Pep & Punch, the creation was self serving, however the reality is we only exist as a business because of our amazing customer base. We say it often and we mean it, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do in our small shop, if it weren’t for the support of our customers. We get to share in some of their biggest successes lives and sometimes we are blessed with the sharing of their tragedies as well. I say blessed because although what they are sharing is heartbreaking, the fact that we are a safe place for them to share such things is truly a blessing and we do not take it for granted. Getting to serve our community members by building relationships is byproduct of a self serving vision, but that byproduct has become the mission.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met my business partner at birth. Paulette Grumbles is my mom and was suppose to be a silent partner with Pep & Punch, she was the financial equity and I was sweat equity. Life took a drastic turn for us in June of 2019 when my dad passed away from cancer. My mom had no desire to move back to their ranch in South Texas. Ultimately she lived with me and my family for a year and a half until her home was built next door to us. I can’t say that being a mother/daughter duo, living together and being business partners while mourning was pretty, because it certainly wasn’t in the beginning.

The stress alone of being business partners is one thing and then pile on all the other factors, oh and let’s throw in a pandemic, it was colorful at best. Trying to figure her roll out at Pep & Punch was trying, she went from being a silent partner to being involved in daily tasks, but I have never been so grateful. We have disagreements here and there, but I would not have the time and freedom in my schedule if she wasn’t present at Pep & Punch.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We do not have a huge following on social media, I know huge is a subjective term when it comes to social media, but I’m proud of the following we do have. My goal in running social is to be authentic to our brand and to us. The grind of posting and staying on top of the algorithm when you’re small in the space feels impossible, so I stay focused on posting consistently on our grid and always posting to stories. It’s not perfect, but it’s manageable for me. If I had one thing to offer, BE CONSISTENT, even if you’re like me and that looks like just one post and six stories a day. Do not get caught up in the “likes,” you will become defeated if that’s your focus.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pepandpunch.shop
• Instagram: @pepandpunch
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pepandpunch
• Other: App with IOS & Google Play: Pep & Punch