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

Jane Smiley, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I wanted my business name to identify that we are involved in celebrations. It needed to be a fun name that people associated with happiness, joy, and maybe even a party. I decided “sunny day” would be a perfect way to advertise that I wanted to help people’s sunny days be even more sunny with my products. I also wanted to honor my daughters in the name I chose. My first daughter, Daisy was stillborn at 33 weeks, and because of that my second pregnancy with my daughter Lottie was surrounded with fear and anxiety. Both of my girls were the reasons I started this business – to heal from losing Daisy, and to help me be a better mom to Lottie – by having a creative outlet just for myself. I took the first two letters of Daisy’s name (DA) and the last two of Lottie’s (IE) to spell “daie” which would add my heart into the name of the business. I studied American Sign Language in college, and had to take several linguistics classes, so I knew that phonetically “daie” would still be understandable to the my customers, and smashed all my ideas together to make Sunny Daie.

Jane Smiley, 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?

Sunny Daie is a custom, reusable, letter banner business. We are female owned and female run. We sell cotton-stuffed letters made out of vintage and salvaged fabric to reduce waste in our community landfills. People buy our banners to celebrate any occasion in their lives. Our most popular banners are our “Happy Birthday” banners as well as our name banners. Name banners are typically used to celebrate weddings or new babies. One of the most unique parts of our banner business is that because our fabrics are sourced sustainably, there are no two banners that look alike. Our sustainable fabrics are not our only way of reducing waste. Compared to paper celebratory banners, our fabric banners last for generations and can be used over and over again further reducing waste. In addition to our unique and rare fabrics our alphabet font is designed completely in-house. You will not find our font of letter patterns anywhere else, because it has been based off of my own handwriting. Not only do our fabric and font choices make us stand out, but each and every banner is completely customizable. We have both upper and lowercase options as well as options that distinguish color tones and pattern styles which allow our customers to receive exactly the banner they are looking for.

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

After I came up with my initial idea of what my business would be, how it would be run, how I would earn money, and how I would make it work with my SAHM schedule, I realized that I was practically finished with all the difficult stuff, and now would just have to find a way to make and sell my banners. My main problem was that I didn’t want to sew with a sewing machine. It always took me longer than hand sewing, and I consistently was getting frustrated while trying to figure out how to work a family member’s machine. I realized that I could hire someone to sew for me. I would pay them the same amount as I paid myself, but they would do a better job, and be much faster than I was, and therefore it wouldn’t cost me as much if I paid by the hour. This is where a high school friend came into the picture. Sage Holman was my saving grace. The business truly couldn’t have happened without her. Lucky for me, Sage LOVES to sew, and was absolutely interested in a part-time job of this salvaged fabric banner business that was just barely taking off. Sage was my second customer and I will always love her for having faith in me and in Sunny Daie.

Sage and I were both stay-at-home moms while Sunny Daie was starting, so a purchase every 2 weeks or so was perfect for both of us learning how to balance our children and this business. For the first year of Sunny Daie I was trying to figure out how to market on Instagram (without having it turn into a 24/7 job on social media). I didn’t want to spend all day everyday learning the algorithm, or making reels, or liking, sharing, and commenting. Sage had dabbled in some social media influencing, and recommended I try sending a banner to an influencer on Instagram. She knew of an influencer @BallerinaFarm who had 7 children – therefore 9 opportunities a year to use a “Happy Birthday” banner. I sent it to Hannah and about a month later she shared about it and my business literally exploded overnight. I woke up to a new order thinking it was a friend of mine, then checked to find out not only did I have one new order from the night before, but I had 42 and they were still pouring in. I had DM’s on Instagram asking if I would ship to Australia and Spain, and so many texts from friends saying they had seen my product on Ballerina Farm’s page. That next week I was equal parts thrilled and terrified. I now had so many customers expecting their products, and Sage and I were used to going at turtle pace. The next several months were filled with family members taking on customer service roles, book club meetings turned into fabric cutting meetings, with nap and bedtime hours heavily sponsored by caffeine for both me and my husband. Our business completely took off because of Sage’s advice.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

In making decisions on how to decorate my daughter’s nursery and coming up with sewn alphabet letters, I shared my process on Instagram and many of my friends and family members asked if I would tell them how I made them, or make some for them.
I realized that this could easily turn into a business once I got the hang of it. My church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) was offering a free “Starting and Growing Your Business” class. I wasn’t working at the time and decided that taking that class would be a good way to distract me while I eagerly waited for my daughter to arrive. The class was a 12 week program that introduced me to what a healthy profit looked like, real life examples of people starting a successful business, and allowed me a safe place to interact with other’s who were pitching business ideas and asking others for advice on what would help them start a business that could grow in a healthy and successful way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sunnydaie.com
• Instagram: sunny.daie