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

Ashleigh, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

The Side Garage, was born one night at the kitchen counter.

A year and a half prior, I had left a position at a screen print shop feeling burnt out. I decided to step away from screen print and design – hoping time would help bring some clarity into what’s next.

I was fortunate to be offered a position at a local outdoor retailer that Elena, (my then girlfriend now wife and co-owner of The Side Garage) had been working bonus hours on the weekend.

Being a new outdoor enthusiast, I dove into the outdoor retail world. The day-to-day tasks weren’t always the most thrilling, but it was slower, steady and predictable. All things that I had lacked in my previous position. I enjoyed learning about the brands and building relationships with customers and coworkers.

It was the first time in 8 years that I wasn’t doing something creative.

Since I was young, I love art, followed fashion trends and stared a little longer at packaging than the normal kid. I had the itch to make something again.

A few months into my new role, I approached the owners with the idea that I could try to help increase their social media and web presence, as well as get a little more involved with the community. It wasn’t my comfort zone, but it was a step towards creating.

We ended up doing some really great things – such as storyteller events, an outdoor gear fair, gear demos and more customer engagement outside of the traditional retail experience.

What I didn’t know at the time is that the totality of these periods of my life – working at a screen print shop, learning social media + storytelling and organizing events for the community would lead us to where we are now.

I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but this idea to start something of our own began to rise up between myself and Elena.

One of us stumbled across an instagram post of someone doing live-printing. “What? You can print outside of a print shop?”

Our minds were blown and our creative hearts exploded. Elena took a deep dive into the research (because that’s her superpower) and we explored the idea of doing something like this in Des Moines. Then late one night we were in the kitchen, one of us on the floor the other on the counter sharing a late night beer – and we just decided to go for it.

The Side Garage – a mobile screen print and design shop with the tagline “more than a side hustle” was born.

We took the leap with the security of full-time jobs and hustled for 2 years before we both went all-in. We focused on learning the art of mobile screen printing and building relationships with people in the community.

From kitchen, to garage and now a bigger garage – it’s been a wild and incredible ride to get here.

Ashleigh, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I (Ashleigh) have a background in design and screen print. Elena previously worked at a Civil Engineering firm handling much of the small business operations side. She’s also the ultimate problem solver and can learn anything.

I’m the one that makes sense of what we do and she’s the one that makes things go.

Community has always been at the forefront of The Side Garage. We want to make screen print and design more accessible to help people engage and understand it more.

Our mission is the same today as it was when we started: Make great things and help others do the same.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Early on we took pretty much anything that came our way. We really bought into the “hustle” mentality working all hours of the day. Working full-time jobs at the start, we really didn’t have another option.

As we began to grow and increase the volume of work we were doing we got to a point where we were stretched pretty thin.

I’m an avid professional development reader – and while I couldn’t tell you which resource it came from – I read something that talked about how when you try to “do it all” you end up sacrificing quality somewhere along the way. We started to miss deadlines and fall short in our communication and ultimately our customer’s experience was lacking.

So we ultimately made the commitment to learn to be selective about what projects made sense for us.

We ultimately ended up turning down some really great opportunities, but we gained so much more in the relationships we built with our other clients.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The thing that helped build our reputation within our market is that we brought print to people. We did something that very few were doing in the community.

By making mobile screen printing our primary focus and going all-in on it, we were able to spend time with our clients and their audience making connections in real life. This lead to more engagement online and generated more connections through word of mouth.

For the almost 7 years we’ve been in business, we’ve only dabbled in online and traditional marketing and have ridden the wave of support from organic word of mouth marketing.

I think this is because we were intentional about building those relationships and showing the Des Moines Community we were going to show up for them.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thesidegarage.com
• Instagram: @thesidegarage
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesidegarage