We recently connected with Betsy Stergiou and Anastasia Papasideris and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Betsy and Anastasia, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

We actually spent quite a lot of time brainstorming our name! While it’s pretty simple to change, say, the layout of our website or the font of our logo, our name would have been a constant; the first & lasting impression we give our customers. “Ammos” means sand in Greek, and what is more representative of Greek summers than sand and sea? We wanted our business to reflect the location of our favorite memories, and our favorite place to be. Once we thought of this phrase, it just clicked!

Betsy and Anastasia, 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?

We have been close friends for way too many years to count! Our shared love of our Greek-American culture is what bonded us from a young age, and what started as a fun pastime of hunting down unique gifts for each other and others came into fruition with the idea of sharing these items with the rest of the US. From jewelry to home ceramics & apparel made from cotton or silk, Ammos and Sea offers something to appeal to all tastes.

It has been so enjoyable (and riveting) watching our growth since our launch in 2017. Our energy and passion that we’ve had since the beginning for what we do is, for us, is the biggest factor of our success. We handpick each and every product and have developed lovely friendships with our designers and artists; this devotion to our brand is reflected in our business practices and the excellent customer service we provide. We believe these are the reasons we have been able to grow and expand our customer base, and we feel blessed to have a majority of repeat shoppers that trust us. We have been humbled and honored to be asked to supply wedding and baptism favors for our customers, as well as contributing to corporate events. We’ve grown a fondness for our customers without ever meeting the majority of them!

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Building a reputation in a market where there is quite a lot of competition can seem so daunting at first. We kept asking ourselves, what can we do to set us apart from the others? An abundance of patience and positivity is a prerequisite in starting a small business we learned, as well as staying true to your business ideals. We have offered quality from the very first day we were in business, and the level has remained consistent. Also, nowadays with social media a rapport between customers and small businesses is a cinch. This way, we’ve been given ideas of new items to offer as well as honoring special requests and orders. By this consistency and availability to our customers, we have established a reputation of integrity, quality and approachability.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

As we mentioned before, this was many moons ago! We met each other in Greek (what else?) language class at our beloved alma mater, the University of Houston (Go Coogs!). We instantly hit it off, taking off for ever-extending lunch breaks after our class, and over the years our friendship has turned into almost family!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ammosandsea.com
• Instagram: Ammosandsea
• Facebook: Ammos & Sea
• Twitter: Ammos&Sea

Image Credits
All photos taken by Ammos and Sea