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

Hi Mallory, thanks for joining us today. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

My parents instilled an entrepreneurial spirit in me from an early age and taught me that any dream, no matter the size, is achievable.

In elementary school, I loved getting candy from bubble gum machines at restaurants, laundry mats, really anywhere in public. I would spend all of my allowance on these gum ball machines any time I saw one. So my parents scrounged up the money to buy my brother and I multiple gum ball machines to place around town to learn what having a business could look like.

We would go as a family to Costco and price out what type of candy would generate the highest ROI. We would chat with the owners of restaurants to sell them on why our candy machines should be in their restaurants. Then, every Saturday morning, we would go around town to refill the machines and count our earnings from the previous week. While we certainly didn’t strike gold on a get-rich-quick scheme, we learned vital lessons that taught me how to manage money, how to create business-focused relationships, and that having my own business wasn’t such a crazy dream.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Mallory Strange and I own Bach Babes, a bachelorette/event planning company. I’m from a small town in North Carolina and quickly realized the hustle and bustle of city life was absolutely for me, so I moved to Atlanta where I was a cheerleader for the Atlanta Falcons for four seasons. While cheering, I learned a love of being ~EXTRA~ from throwing over the top parties, to dining at the best restaurants in town. I also had a full time job working in social media and influencer marketing.

As 2020 hit and COVID rolled through the city, I packed up and temporarily moved to Nashville, TN to take the opportunity to live in a new city while work-from-home life provided a new sense of freedom. While living in Nashville, I began noticing all the bachelorette parties coming to celebrate their bride’s special weekend. Not only this, but also all the small details that go into planning a bride’s perfect bachelorette weekend to compliment her fairytale wedding.

When a friend came to town to celebrate her bachelorette, I helped her set up the decor, plan their itinerary (from a local’s point of view), and helped them plan all the little details that the Maid of Honor typically has to prepare. Out of this came the realization that many Maid of Honor’s have trouble planning these over-the-top shindigs, needing to live up to the caliber they want to provide for their BFF, and the overall struggle of planning during their already busy daily life. With all of this in mind, Bach Babes was born!

In the first year of business, we planned over 500 parties, created an ecosystem of local partnerships to drive tourism sales to local small business, hired 13 incredible women, and made so many bride’s dreams come true. We were recognized on an episode of CNBC Make It, ranked in the top 3 for Best New Businesses and Best Event Planning by the Nashville Scene Magazine for 2021 and were interviewed by numerous local news stations for keeping an eye on tourism fluctuation during the pandemic. We now have rounded out into a full-service party planning company doing everything from bachelorette parties, to birthday parties, all the way to girls trips. We plan itineraries, decorate for any theme, create all custom decor in-house, create personalized goody bags for all attendees, pretty much anything you can think of, we can make it happen!

We just launched Bach Babes Boxes, to turn our service offering into a product offering, making our decor shippable if someone wants a Bach Babes set up but aren’t traveling to Nashville. Lastly, we just launched in Austin, TX as well and have just began creating our ecosystem of partnerships and creating curated events in Texas.

Knowing that we are making a bride’s dream come true by uniting local women and local women owned businesses, really is a dream come true for us.

The mission of our business is to take the stress out of planning so our clients can focus on throwing the confetti. Our clients are generally celebrating a once-in-a-lifetime event and only get a few days of celebrating so making this event prefects our mission. Additionally, empowering the young women behind the curtain is equally important. Our team is learning the value of strong customer service, attention to detail, work ethic, how to be a team player, and so many other lifelong skills while working in a fun environment making dreams come true!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When starting a business, it’s easy for imposter syndrome to creep in. Thoughts that rang through my brain included: Why would anyone want to buy this from me? They’re going to be able to tell this is a brand new business and that I don’t have everything perfectly together. How am I supposed to create prices that people would actually pay? All of these thoughts (and a million others) kept me up at night.

When creating my business I started an instagram page, shared it to my own instagram page and facebook and was ready for all the leads to come filing in!! Crickets. I spent hours and hours creating a beautiful website that would surely bring business in!! Crickets. I told so many people about this idea I had and tried to spread the word through the community. Crickets again. All the imposter syndrome thoughts ran through my brain every time I would create a big push and get absolutely nothing out of it.

After pushing hard for 1 month and not getting one single inquiry, I completely gave up and was embarrassed when anyone would bring up the “business” I tried to open. It was embarrassing to put myself out on a limb for this thing I totally believed in and not have any reciprocity. So I gave up on this dumb idea.

A month went by and I didn’t post anything else, didn’t talk to anyone about the business and I completely tried to erase the embarrassment from my brain. Until my best friend pushed me to give it one more shot (in which I said absolutely not) but to try to put my business on TikTok and if that didn’t work, I could give up for good. So I gave in, created a Tiktok video of the only party I had ever set up (for free) and overnight, my video got over 300K views! I had inquires flowing in that just kept coming like something I hadn’t ever seen before, jumping over to my beautifully designed website I had worked so hard on and checking out the instagram I had spent the month posting on. Had I completely given up on my idea when things were difficult at the beginning, or had I completely succumbed to my inner pessimistic thoughts I would absolutely not be where I am today.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Anyone who is starting a business in this day and age, needs a TikTok. I literally shout it from the rooftops any time I meet a fellow entrepreneur. No matter what sector you’re in, no matter if you feel you’re not “hip” enough to create content for Tiktok, still give it a try.

The algorithm on Tiktok is like no other social platforms to date. Your content can be streamed to hundreds of thousands of people, who have interest in your product, no matter how many followers you have, how professional your content looks, etc. I’ve witnessed so many business owner’s lives change because of videos blowing up on Tiktok.

Because of this, TikTok has always been our biggest revenue driver and highest lead traffic source.

Contact Info:

• Website: bachbabes.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bach_babes/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallory-strange/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@bachbabesplanning