Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Amanda Dare. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Amanda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I started Woman-Owned Wallet as a response to emotional trauma I felt growing up. I was surrounded by positive masculinity, and femininity was only ever tolerated. Being an entrepreneur for 15 years now, I grasp a concept and head full force into it. When I was making mistakes with money in my previous 5 businesses, I often felt that I wasn’t taught to manage money and that I was “just bad with money”. Realizing that money is a tool and managing it is a skill I can develop changed my life and businesses dramatically. By sharing my issues with managing money and how I feel about money, especially through Woman-Owned Wallet: The Podcast, I have provided the opportunity for women to foster a positive relationship with their own wallet.
Through the WOW Gift Shop, where we sell all woman-owned products, our shoppers can see their direct impact of their money going into the wallets of women. Our research shows that 90% of the money a woman earns goes back into their local community, often into childcare, education, mental health, and healthcare (this compares to 40% from the wallets of men, mostly due to societal roles). Women are not treated equally in our society politically, economically, and socially, so by providing our customers with the trust and opportunity to make a difference is a major attractive quality.
The WOW Gift Shop is also located in the NuLu Neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. NuLu is next to downtown Louisville and a major tourist attraction. WOW created the Woman-Owned Wallet Tour that includes the 40+ woman-owned businesses within a few blocks of our shop. This allows our customers to continue their experience beyond the 4 walls of WOW and put money into the wallets of women across our neighborhood!
WOW chooses to celebrate women, support woman-owned businesses, and break the taboo of women being bad at managing money. The biggest impact we can have on our community is to put money in the wallets of women, the fastest and most direct way to do that is to put money in the wallet of a woman-owned business!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hi! Amanda Dare here! Yes, that is my real name. I am an Aries, a creative and curious artist, lover of Bravo, married to my best friend for over 10 years now, and a middle child of two brothers.
I have been an entrepreneur for 15 years and have owned 6 businesses. Being a creative leader from a young age with a determination for perfectionism and issues with ADD, I always excelled at anything I set my mind to. In college, I changed my major 8 times, going from music education, art history, classical and modern languages, theater, costuming, and sign language interpreting. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science.
In college, I kept my schedule full with being a resident assistant (RA), a student ambassador (giving tours to new students), wardrobe master of the theater dept., and spent a semester working at the Disney College Program. I opened my first business during college as well, making headbands in my dorm room to selling them in local boutiques, to opening my first shop!
I mention these things because every step has been a major part of my inspiration and passion moving into the businesses that I run now. I often felt out of place and overcommitted, but that was more connected to my ADD than I originally realized. I was also suffering from pain for the last 15 years that was actually undiagnosed diabetes. With these realizations came a lot of medical trauma, mostly realizing that doctors for mental and physical health dismissed me as crazy and did not listen to my concerns. Since my mental and physical health made it difficult to be present at a 9-5 job, I decided that running my own business and having flexibility in my schedule was my only option for success in adulthood.
Through therapy, I worked through the idea that every space I was in through life I had to mask my true feelings for the comfort of everyone else. Women more often experience these feelings to feel safe in society, but it affects so many of us. So I stopped fitting in, stopped hiding the parts of myself that I loved engaging with, and my creativity exploded into an expression of my version of femininity that has been appreciated by so many through our WOW World!
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
There are so many stories of mistakes or misjudgments throughout my 15 years of entrepreneurship. It’s impossible not to have them as part of your success story. Business changes day to day and minute to minute sometimes, especially in the retail world. For example: your retail sales could literally change with the weather, with the events around your shop, with the virality of a social media post, or anything and everything, etc.
In the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I thought we would just double business every single year, and we did until the numbers got so hard to reach the next levels. Growing my past business from 10k to 50k to 110k to 230k, doubling 230k was my goal, and I had to take on so much debt to grow the business; my profit just went to paying the fees of the loans. I took a look at that business and realized I could not scale a handmade dress business to the place where I would ever make enough profit to live on, so I made major decisions to wind it back down to a profitable place. To get to the profitable place was incredibly difficult and included moving spaces, firing staff, and reconsolidating my debt into one loan. I did feel like I had failed at this point, but I absolutely did not. I ended up much happier without all the pressure of keeping the business doubling every year and having 20 staff members to manage in a mall storefront that was open 353 days a year. I moved into a local shop and invested in my one team member and paid off debt.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
The way I built my reputation in my local market was by showing up at every event I could attend. When I was at a networking event or a vendor market, I didn’t spend time selling my products. Instead, I talked to people and learned about them. I told jokes, made silly comments, got people laughing, and allowed us to have a human experience together. I think people found this refreshing because many times at these events, people are just trying to sell you something repeatedly. So, stand out and don’t try to sell products to someone the first or second time you meet them; focus on creating a relationship instead.
Contact Info:
- Website: womanownedwallet.com wowfactorcollective.com
- Instagram: @womanownedwallet @wowfactorcollective
- Facebook: @womanownedwallet @wowfactorcollective
- Youtube: Woman-Owned Wallet
- Yelp: Woman-Owned Wallet, WOW Factor Collective
Image Credits
Meagan Jordan Photography