We were lucky to catch up with Ashley & Melissa McDonough recently and have shared our conversation below.
Ashley & Melissa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How do you feel about asking friends and family to support your business? What’s appropriate, what’s not? Where do you draw the line?
Our friends and family have been amazing throughout our whole process of becoming business owners. We cannot thank them enough!! Our biggest blessing has been them always wanting to fully support us and what we do. They don’t ask for discounts or free decor, they refer us to any and everyone they can, they even help out with installs if one of us cannot make one. Having such an amazing support system behind us is what keeps us going!
Ashley & Melissa, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
We are two sisters who have so much love for event decorating!! Through the years we’ve had numerous celebrations with our family. Any chance we had we were decorating, whether it was graduations, Halloween, gender reveals, birthdays, or just because. We always found a reason to get crafty. One day we decided to turn our passion into a business and SisterLuxe was founded. We are mainly known for providing balloon decor and backdrop rentals but our goal is to be so much more! When we named our business we wanted to keep in mind that we don’t only want to be known for our balloons. Our long term goal was to always establish our business into becoming full event stylist/planners. While we have a few full events under our belt we are always working for more! We are extremely proud of what we have done in the first year of us being business owners. Especially since we started up during the pandemic. We hope to have the continued love and support so we can keep POPPIN’ through Nashville!!
How did you build your audience on social media?
Building our social media presence was a challenge at first. We both had hardly ever used our personal social media accounts, so it was almost like learning from scratch how everything worked and what the best ways were to get our name out there. It started with creating mock ups so we could start posting on our business account. Then we would use our personal accounts to share those post with our followers. As we continued doing that we started gaining our friends/family as followers who would then repost us on their social pages, gaining us more and more followers. Once we learned more we found that boosting certain post & using certain hashtags brought in more people as well.
The best advice we had from another balloon artist was to “fake it til you make it” and that is exactly what we did! If we didn’t have a booking we created mocks and posted them to keep our audience engaged. It also gave us the opportunity to learn our craft and find our style. If we didn’t post a mock we would make post on our stories. Some would be of our calendar for bookings, balloon jokes, business quotes, etc… As long as we posted something and our followers saw it we knew we were on the right track.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
Hands down word of mouth! We cannot express enough how amazing it has been to hear from a client that they heard about us from a friend, family member, or even a friend of a friend. Sometimes from people who have never booked with us and that’s what grows our excitement even more! Being newer in this industry, it really means a lot to us knowing there are so many people out there that support us through and through.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.sisterluxecreationsllc.com/
- Instagram: Sisterluxecreationsllc
- Facebook: SisterLuxe Creations, LLC
- Yelp: SisterLuxe Creations
- Other: Tiktok: Sisterluxecreationsllc