We recently connected with Brandy Johnson and Crystal Pettitt and have shared our conversation below.

Brandy/Crystal, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

Opening The Rabbit Hole was a huge risk for us both. When we had the idea to open a store it was about keeping access to dance supplies due to the closure of a 35-year-old dance academy. With it went the only dance supply for close to 100 miles. With five kids between us in dance we knew we were going to be facing challenges getting the things we needed for our kids’ classes but at the same neither of us believed that a standalone dance supply shop was going to bring enough revenue to support us. With both of us driving 60-80 miles away to towns with kids’ resale stores for our shopping needs it hit us one day that kids’ resale was exactly what our own local communities were lacking. So the idea was born to bring both of these much needed industries to our own communities. We started with a simple plan and the pieces came together at the same time that other plans grew. There was the obvious hurdle of funding this new venture. We looked into options with the local small business groups but although there were options for loans those loans were much larger than we needed and much larger than we cared to go into debt starting a new business. So we paid for everything we did out of pocket up to and even several weeks after opening. We had the support of several other community members that wanted to see this happen. Some even worked out consignment arrangements with us to help us lower our initial inventory costs. They shared our posts and cheered us on even before we had a location. It felt good and it kept us motivated. We could not have done this without them. Currently the store sustains itself and we have not had to dig deeper into our own pockets. We haven’t paid oursleves back but we know that day is coming and look forward to feeling that weight lifted.

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?

We are two moms who work fulltime other jobs while creating an upscale resale shopping experience for our local communities. We believe everyone deserves to feel good when they shop for their families even in resale. We have set out to create an environment where you can get affordable, nice clothing while feeling like you are in a fancy boutique. We purchase clothing directly from our shoppers and offer fair prices back to them on items for their kids, and even some for them. We accept donated clothing as well and share the profits of donated items 50/50 with local charities in need of extra support. The charities are from the towns all around us and they receive three months of our donation sales. We are incredibly proud of ourselves for the work we have put into making this dream come true and extremely thankful for those that have supported us in all the ways possible. We have so many ideas down the road that we cannot wait to share. We know parenting in this world is hard and we want to be here for years to come helping families find time to feel the joys of raising their children.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Crystal and I met via 4-H as we both have kids that raise rabbits as their projects. We would see each other at rabbit events and fairs but our daughters were friends at school. We ended up in the same 4H club about 2 years in and quickly connected. It wasn’t until the idea for a store came about that we even ever spent time together without kids and not at a 4H event but it just worked. We shared values, we both wanted to create better things for our kids and our town, and we just got along like we had known each other for years. Our first relationship was a business oriented and now we are each other’s support for so many other things. Everything about taking this leap with each other has felt right since day one and we are not stopping here!

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Trust is key. We are both learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses as well as learning this industry. While some conversations might seem hard to approach, they simply have to happen in order to avoid building up any type of resentment. We get frustrated sometimes but we both know it comes from a good place and a desire for our business to perform at the level we envision.

We hired our first employee to help alleviate some of the chaos of balancing our other jobs and running a business. While we are yet to receive any form of monetary compensation we are paying for help because we know that to sustain our personal workloads, we needed another set of hands. We found someone knowledgeable in the field of dance that not only can help us cover hours at the store but that we can learn from. Knowing that we all have a shared interest in the future of The Rabbit Hole keeps everyone going and looking forward to what’s to come. We have some plans in the near future for building stronger relationships with each other that we haven’t shared with our employee yet, but we can’t wait to be able to show her how important she is to our success.       

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rabbitholehannibal.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089406860443

Image Credits
We have taken all our own photos