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

Beth, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

I think the most important characteristic when running a business is tenacity. Most successful businesses that have been around for a long time were small when they started out. Building a successful business takes years and you need to be tenacious to survive all the curveballs that life and your business throws at you long enough to reach success. A couple years after starting my business, I developed an unexplained illness that turned out to be Chronic Lyme disease. Managing a chronic illness while running a business wasn’t easy but I just kept working to get it running as smoothly as possible. I’m grateful today to be able to run my business from home and only having to work a few hours a week. This gives me the time to focus on keeping myself healthy and in remission from Lyme disease.

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

My name is Beth McLeod and I’m the owner of Quahog Bay Bedding. My company makes specialty bedding products that are made by skilled USA seamstresses. The business idea just “happened” while trying to find V shaped sheets for a sailboat I owned. I couldn’t find any options online. I had two sailboats at the time and decided to make a fitted sheet design that could be Universal and fit all different V shaped mattresses sizes. This cinching fitted sheet design became known as CinchFit and we found that everyone loved this design, not just boaters. I was 42 at the time so this was a late start second career for me. We now specialize in making our CinchFit Sheets in all home sizes. We also make the only Split Top size sheet design that doesn’t tear and we have a large line of boat bedding products. A lot of our success has come from providing exceptional personalized customer service in addition to providing great products.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I lost almost all of my employees in a short amount of time during the COVID pandemic. I had to pivot the business to hiring and training remote seamstresses. I closed my sewing shop and started making the products from my home while training and hiring remote workers. It took me two months to make the transition. I now have fully trained seamstresses and can focus on managing my business. Not having a production location has helped keep expenses down and it’s been a great relief for me to not have to manage a physical location and full-time employees anymore.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We sell our products on our own website, Amazon and Etsy. We’ve had a lot of success on Amazon where people are already interesting in buying a product when they are on the Amazon website. We prefer to sell products on our website to avoid Amazon and Etsy selling fees. Some of our loyal website customers initially found us on Amazon. Our website gained traction using social media and boating groups initially. We have a comprehensive blog with DIY boat project posts, linen care posts and videos, etc. We used a larger Woocommerce and WordPress set up for many years but the website maintenance and hosting costs were very expensive. We switched to a more basic and less expensive Shopify website and it’s worked out great for us. We now keep all of our products stored at Amazon and orders from Etsy and our website automatically import to Amazon FBA for fulfillment. We definitely see more sales volume on Amazon when our products are FBA with Prime shipping options for customers. The cons are that we need to initiate new product manufacturing 4 weeks ahead of when we need replenishments and occasionally Amazon provided customer refund for products that are not re-sellable.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.quahogbaybedding.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cinchfitbedding/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quahogbaybedding
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quahogbaybedding
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/BayQuahog
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@quahogbaybedding8252