We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Carley McLain a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Carley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I remember looking at my husband, Andy, and telling him “I’m going to sell all of the random stuff in our garage that doesn’t fit in our new house and when I get X amount, im going to buy a giant printer and try to make coloring banners to sell to the neighborhood kids”. He is used to my crazy antics so I really don’t even think he blinked – he just said “sounds good!” He drove me to the FedEx store the next day to pickup a giant test print that I had ordered and to figure out what size box I would need to ship them. It was pretty much as simple as that…Busy Banners was born!
We were trying to make extra money to go toward the adoption of our second son, and I always have been creative and entrepreneurial. I remembered seeing a company online that was making personalized placemats and signs that were 3 ft long and I just thought to myself how fun would it be to make a coloring page and make it at least twice that size! When the printer arrived at my house – I got right to work and started drawing all of the elements for my first banner and designing it until it was perfect. It was right before Halloween so I decided instead of putting candy on our porch….I was going to use this as an opportunity to market my new business. I made small Halloween placemat coloring pages and wrapped them all individually with my business card tied to the top…I filled buckets with them and left them on the porch next to a huge bowl of crayons. By the time I got home from taking our little ones trick or treating…the porch was empty! The orders started flowing in soon after.
When I first started Busy Banners, I had no idea what was in store. Truthfully, I was just excited to be using my brain again after being in newborn mom mode for so long. It was exciting to have something to do every day that presented unique challenges and allowed me to interact with so many different and new people.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
If you haven’t ever heard of a Busy Banner…it is a GIANT 2ft by 6ft coloring banner that is hand drawn and printed right here in Fort Worth, Tx! Each Busy Banner comes wrapped and ready to gift with a small package of crayons right on top!
Busy Banners donates 10% of our profits to some amazing organizations working in the foster care and adoption space. Our family was built through the gift of adoption and we love using this business as a way to give back to some incredible people doing some very selfless work.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
The best part about Busy Banners is for sure our wonderful customers! Being a small business – it is so fun to engage with our customers and really get to know them.I have made a big effort to respond quickly to DM’s, to always go out of my way to try to make every request a “yes”, and to give back to our loyal purchasers! I get to donate banners to lots of school auctions, be a part of making custom banners for special birthdays, and also field a lot of questions about my family and adoption. All of these things have really helped Busy Banners have a great positive reputation in the community and beyond. I think just staying personally involved has made a huge difference – when someone sends our account a DM about the possibility of getting expedited shipping because they waited too late to order a banner for their kids birthday party – and I get to personally message back saying no problem, I know how that is and I will make a special trip to the warehouse today to get this in the mail for you…it just really means a lot to people! It is so fun to be able to do that.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
Figuring out the best and most cost effective way to manufacture the banners has always been a fun journey. There are a lot of logistical challenges that come with the fact that my product is PAPER. It is easily crushed, weighs a ton when there is a lot of it stacked together, etc. I knew if I got the banners printed somewhere else then that place would also have to roll and label them before shipping them to me because I would never be able to tell what was what if they were all mixed together and I knew that that would mean my creativity would be stifled a bit because everything would have to be very planned out (which is not how I usually operate!). I decided just to figure out how to do it all myself…and now we have a warehouse that produces 100% of our products on site! We print, roll, wrap & ship the banners from our little HQ. I love it this way because there are no lead times we have to wait on, I can quality control everything with my own eyes, and we have the flexibility to change designs and do new things whenever we want! I have been known to have an idea on a Thursday and by Friday have the banner drawn and designed and on the website for purchase – this would not be able to happen if we weren’t manufacturing everything on site!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.busybanners.com
- Instagram: @busybanners
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/busybanners
Image Credits
J. Cox Photography