We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bodied Boutique a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Bodied , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Bodied is a female owned, online boutique. We came up with the idea over a year ago, based on wanting financial independence not only for ourselves but our families and being tired of working for others for less than our worth. We all had full time schedules with a lot of responsibilities and still found ourselves drained after ginning our all to organizations that cared nothing about us. Joanne, one of the co-owners, worked a full time job, while planning a wedding, and earning her masters degree. Shannon, the other co owner, also had a full time job while running her own business, and is a mother. I am also a co-owner, my name is Alexis. I am a full time student studying sonography and I am also a mother. We sat on Shannon’s couch, one Friday night, thinking of ways to get another stream of income. We all loved going out with our friends and getting dressed up. We loved the feeling of empowering women by making them look and feel good, so we came up with the idea of an online boutique. We bounced ideas off of each other to make things creative and affordable for women like us. After a lot of trial and error we found the best quality pieces and made a point to offer them at affordable prices while others were increasing their prices. Fair price points were really important to us because we know so many women who love the feeling of getting dressed, going out and feeling beautiful. We understood that some women couldn’t afford a lot of what was being offered so they had to settle for less. We wanted to give every woman a chance to feel beautiful and not have to break the bank to do so.
Bodied , 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?
Bodied Boutique is owned by 3 women. We are first generation Americans, our families are from Jamaica. We were raised in hard working Jamaican households with big dreams and aspirations. We all bring different elements to the business that contributes to the determination we have to be a success. We pride ourselves on quality execution, organization of the brand, with a fun relatable flair that makes Bodied. We started our company January of 2022, with the intention of making women feel confident, sexy and comfortable. When we look at each other, we have different styles and different bodies and we wanted to bring that to our vision. We bring our styles and ideas to every meeting in regards to buying inventory, so we can get each other’s opinion and feel for each piece. Once two of us agree, the pieces are chosen and probably eventually ordered. We take in consideration the different body types, the different height in women and quality as well. Our goal is to be a household name that caters to all types of women. We want everyone to feel assured with divine femininity in our clothes and become loyal customers. Our customers are handled attentively and with care. Our brand provides two piece sets, dresses, jumpsuits and swimwear. We will eventually expand and bring other pieces to our collections. It’s not always easy bringing 3 personalities together and having to agree on what is best for Bodied. We pride ourselves on always coming together and putting Bodied first.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
Even though Bodied was started in January of 2022, our friendships were developed in middle school. We all met and developed friendship in middle school, went to different high schools and kept in touch after. Joanne went away to college but Shannon and I were still living in the same area. Here we are, over 10 years later. Trusting and loving each other enough to open an online boutique. We never had to question if we had each other’s best interest. We just had to work on being able to separate the two, balancing our every day schedules and giving Bodied the time it needed. It’s natural to have days or moments, we don’t always agree or get along, but the friendships keep us rooted and are what get us through those moments. Hopefully Bodied is only the beginning of what we can create together.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
We launched June 17, 2022. With a little over a 100 followers, which were mainly family and friends. We had to come up with a way to gain followers and get our name out there. We started working with a social media manager, who happened to be a close friend. She helped with giving us ideas on how to market and also tips that we didn’t think of. We began messaging people from our personal pages and asking them to follow the business page. Joanne began following people from the business page, liking pictures and commenting as well. To help build our followers and help with engagements on the page. We also started posting 2 weeks prior to our launch date to help build the anticipation for our audience to entice the new inventory. We planned a photo shoot and utilized the images to post behind the scenes footage. We posted pictures of the models and photographer. We gave sneak peaks of different looks. We would post polls on our stories and find other ways to just engage with our followers. It’s been almost 2 months since we launched and we have over 600 followers. Social media is an everyday task, you have to be present daily to gain these engagements and followers. For us, it is definitely a work in progress. There’s so much more we have to learn with building the audience and presence we want on social media. We will continue to be creative in our growth and I know we’ll get there.
Contact Info:
- Website: bodiedbyuboutique.com
- Instagram: bodiedbyu
- Facebook: bodiedbyu
Image Credits
Photographer: 2Raw Footage (Miami, FL) Bodied Owners (For also providing Photos and Behind the Scenes Footage)