We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chelsea Gorsuch. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chelsea below.
Chelsea, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
I will never forget the night I sat down with my parents and told them that I would be leaving my career in school counseling (yeah… the one I had gotten a master’s degree for, that’s the one 😉) to pursue my sign making business. It was the scariest and yet surest decision I had ever made in my life. It was also a giant stepping stone in my life’s journey of following a more faith-dependent path over the safe, expected route I had been on to that point. (My parents, by the way, accepted my decision with only a little bit of fear hidden in their voices. Bless their hearts.) With three young children to provide for alongside my husband Wes, leaving a career that came complete with a pension was no small risk to take.
Now, seven years later, I am incredibly grateful to look around Joyfully Said to find twelve more faith-filled faces (including Wes who eventually left nursing to join me here) who have jumped on board this beautiful journey with me, all eager to see where God takes us next. Challenges have come and gone (and they always will), but man- the joy of creating lovely wall art, curating a refreshing space for our guests to visit and shop, the challenge of building this dream with a great team of people, and the stretching of our faith as we face each hurdle with expectancy for how God will come through yet again- it has been worth the risk 1000 times over.
I recently heard a quote that I resonated with completely: “If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” (quote by Erica Jong) I cannot imagine how different life would be, and how many beautiful blessings I would have missed out on, had I not taken the leap to start my business, and I will forever be grateful.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Chelsea Gorsuch, and I own a handcrafted wooden wall art and home decor company called Joyfully Said. Located in Middlebury, Indiana on a property surrounded by grain bins and containing the oldest building in our town- an old grain mill- Joyfully Said is is now made up of a busy team of 12 who help design, market, produce and ship wooden art, and run our retail shop. Joyfully Said was born in 2016, right after our third child was also born! While on maternity leave from my then career as a school counselor, I began dabbling in making wood signs for my own home. A casual Facebook share resulted in a few orders, and things grew from there. Within a few months, I had a few family members joining in my home a day or two a week to help fulfill orders, and a few months after that we were looking for space to rent. Needless to say, I never returned to my school counseling job and my husband Wes ended up leaving his career in nursing eventually as well, to join me in our business full time.
Joyfully Said was created out of a passion for the power of words, and also my love of a cozy and inviting home. We have been able to combine those two passions with our product- wooden wall art that speaks important reminders into people’s homes, while also looking on trend and helping our customers create spaces they love to be in. In more recent years, we have grown to collaborate with emerging artists from around the country who create original pieces for us that we are able to print on wood using our in-house printer. In addition, we curate decorate accents and housewares that we love, creating an online and brick and mortar shopping experience where our customers can trust that they are choosing high-quality, beautiful items while also remaining budget conscious.
Faith has been an integral part of our business journey, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon! Owning a business has helped us learn to trust God on a much deeper level and to become more conscious of how we lead others and the direction we are pointing them. Ultimately, our faith also guides our designs and our product decisions, with the hopes that the items we are sending out into homes do just what our name states- add joy, beauty, and truth into spaces and ultimately impact those who live in them. We are passionate about making a positive impact in our local community, as well as our more global online community!
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Like so many others, 2020 hit us like a freight train. I will never forget the day we found out our schools were shutting down and we would also need to close our brick and mortar location. That afternoon I ran into one of our employees as we were picking up our childrens’ school items. I couldn’t even speak to her; all I could do was let a few tears slip out. I had so many thoughts, fears, and questions, but no words. Would we need to let some employees go? How will our staff juggle working with our kids out of school? Would Joyfully Said even survive? However, I allowed myself to sit in fear for about an hour before deciding that we WOULD make it through this, no matter how scrappy we needed to become. Thankfully, our team felt the same way, and everyone was on board to get creative. We developed at-home sign painting kits for kids, which were a big hit. We created product bundles from our brick and mortar shop and advertised them on social media, offering curbside pick up. Our team worked staggered shifts in isolated areas so that we could keep production going for our online orders. Low and behold, our business grew significantly in 2020… but the story could have ended very differently had we allowed fear to stop us in our tracks. I’m so glad we didn’t!
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
The process for creating our wooden wall art has evolved immensely over the years, from very much a “handmade, one at a time” situation to more of a full-fledged production line. In the beginning, designs were created on the computer, printed on engineer prints at Staples, hand-traced onto wood, and finally filled in with paint. It wasn’t long before that process was clearly too slow and cumbersome, so we invested in an industrial vinyl cutter. This allowed us to cut one-time use stencils to paint our designs onto the wall art. At this point, each piece took about an hour of labor, start to finish. Finally, my husband pushed me to consider investing in an $80,000 printer to print our designs directly onto the painted wood surfaces. After traveling to a showroom to see how the technology worked for ourselves, we made the leap and took out a loan to get started with the printer that we are still using today. It was a divine prompting to invest in the printer when we did, because it was less than six months later that we introduced painted art into our product offerings, and those have been our best-sellers ever since. Without a printer, we would not have the ability to reproduce art like we now do. We have now owned our printer for five years and we just made the last payment on it! Soon, it will be time for an upgrade. ;) It has paid for itself many times over though, and is an investment we would happily make over and over. There is one part of our production process that has really never changed, and that is framing. From the beginning we have hand stained and hand framed every single piece that comes through our woodshop. While it is time-intensive, and we have explored some robotic possibilities, nothing has proven to be as trustworthy as our well-trained framers who pay attention to detail and ensure that each piece is framed perfectly before sending it off to get shipped or to become displayed in our retail shop.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.joyfullysaid.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joyfullysaid/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joyfullysaid/