We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Allie Wren a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Allie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

Running a small business is a full-time job! (And by that, we sometimes mean 24/7.) The flexibility is great for our family while we still have young children at home. We are able to work our own hours. This sometimes means late night projects and most of the time, that’s not too hard for us to accomplish.

Sometimes we are at the mercy of our own clients’ orders. This means last minute orders and busy seasons of the year are particularly hard because it requires us to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time. Typically this only happens to us a few times of year. During these rush seasons, we sometimes wish we just had a regular job! But most of the time, we love running a small business and how it fits into our lives.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We decided a few years ago that we wanted to get into making custom items. We invested in a CO2 laser and started learning how to engrave and cut materials. Slowly overtime we increased our skill set and our machines. We now own lasers that work on several types of products and offer embroidery and screen prints.

Some of the products we offer are:
Custom t-shirts, custom embroidered hats and hats with patches, and other custom engraved items such as wallets, knives, jewelry, ammo cans, keychains, cutting boards, license plates, and wood decor.

Something that sets us apart is the ability to create custom designs. We work with individuals to make personalized items and other small businesses on orders for their brands and companies. We pride ourselves on being able to work with our customers to make designs that match their needs and bring their ideas to life.

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

Building an audience on social media can be tricky if you don’t know where to start. We first created Instagram and Facebook accounts and showed family and friends who graciously posted or recommended our page. We also tried to use our page to follow others locally in the area that we think could benefit from our services.

Posting regularly is my best piece of advice for anyone wanting to grow their social media pages. Daily is best, but we aren’t always able to do this. We have noticed the more often we post, the more business we receive.

One other easy way to gain followers is to offer giveaways. Most people like getting the chance to win items. The key to success for these giveaways is having people interact with posts so they are shared and followers get traced back to following or liking your page. Generously offering an item or items you think most people would like is key to getting more involvement.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

We started selling items basically through social media pages and through word of mouth from local businesses, family, and friends. When we wanted to grow our business, we created a Shopify website.

Some of the pros of having a website are that our orders and more organized. We can see exactly what has been purchased and can contact customers directly through our site. Shopify makes creating a website very easy and once you get started, customers have an easy way to see all you offer and purchase items. It’s nice to be able to refer people to our site so they can see examples of what we make and decide what is best for them. We are able to control how much traffic we have based on the items we offer and how much promoting we do in a given time.

Some drawbacks to having a Shopify site is that it takes some time to create your own site. We also aren’t one of the first sites you’d find when searching for laser engraved items and advertising takes more resources. Going to a mainstream service like Etsy or Amazon would likely create more opportunities for new customers, but we aren’t planning on expanding to those platforms yet.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wren-works.myshopify.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wrenworks_2021?igsh=MWdlcW8yb25iZnl2NA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/12LXnrGx95k/?mibextid=wwXIfr