We were lucky to catch up with Cathy Cardenas recently and have shared our conversation below.

Cathy , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My daughter Hope and I wanted to bring together our love of inspirational messages and our love of giving back to the community. We decided to create a clothing line with fun, inspirational messages, and to partner with some amazing charities to not only support financially, but that we can also help to support by raising awareness for them. Naming the brand Hope Wear was two fold; after my daughter’s name and by having the company provide additional hope and support to a few choice charity organizations.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I have been a publicist for athletes, tv personalities and for various brands and services. There’s a lot that goes into a being a publicist, a lot of discipline, and a lot of tenacity. I love what I do. I love providing my clients a platform of media placements for them to show the world what they’re made of and what sets them apart from the rest.

Being able to bring this skillset to my own brand, Hope Wear Clothing, has been incredible. As in publicity, there is so much detail that goes into Hope Wear; into each shirt, each design, each color, the branding of the company, our mission, the shipping, even the packaging. I feel like I’m making the world a better place by hopefully providing more smiles throughout someone’s day because of the message they’re wearing, “on their sleeve.”

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

Hope Wear Clothing is sold at HopeWearClothing.com and we recently launched our page on Etsy. I prefer to keep things close, for ease of tracking sales figures, shipping, inventory, etc. I would one day love to be so big to be able to accommodate more orders on multiple sites, and with those thousands of orders would come the revenue to afford a larger distribution team.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

The problem is so many people think they need to go big in the very beginning. That, to me, is one of the biggest financial mistakes you can make when starting a business. You don’t need the most expensive things to start a company; if it’s a good idea, it will work. With Cathy Cardenas PR, I spent very little money when I started and 12 years later, I’m one of the top PR executives in the country. I don’t need a fancy office or excess starting costs to create a successful company. To be successful, I simply need to deliver on my promises and work hard to get my clients the publicity placements that best suit them. I worked on building strong relationships with people and really listening to them. Those are things that money can’t buy.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.CathyCardenas.com
• Instagram: CathyCardenasPR
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CathyCardenasPR
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CathyCEO77

Image Credits
All taken on my personal phone