We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elizabeth Winfrey a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Elizabeth thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

So I went to college to get a degree in Graphic Design because I loved anything creative and wanted to be able to use that wherever and however I could. Fast forward to college, internships, and my first job at a marketing / t-shirt printing company. While working at my marketing job, my (future) mother-in-law and boutique owner Val, reached out to me and asked if I wanted to design t-shirts for her boutique. Working at a boutique didn’t quite seem to fit my personality at first but I loved being able to come up with t-shirt ideas and do other graphic design work. After working there for about a year, Val came to me with the idea of creating our own t-shirt brand. She had designed some t-shirts of her own for her boutique several years ago called “One-Word” with the purpose of creating unique faith-based graphic tees. She wanted us to start that idea again but with a new name. So for the next couple of months we brainstormed about what our name would be and what the purpose of this t-shirt line would be. The cool thing about graphic tees is that everyone reads them and often they help start up conversations. Both of us having a passion for Jesus and making His name known, we decided to call our brand Spread the Word: a faith-based brand to design unique tees and create conversations about Jesus. Another part of our brand that we wanted to create was a “give back.” Giving back is hard to do as a small business and grow, but we wanted to be able to give back even in small ways to our community whether that was donating to our church’s giving box, or donating shirts to a women’s shelter, etc. We also wanted to encourage our followers and customers to adopt the same thinking of being generous with what we have and giving back in whatever way they can to their community. So, in the middle of 2020, we launched our idea and started designing and selling our Spread the Word tees in Val’s boutique. Fast forward to 2022, the boutique closed down, I got married, added a baby, and transitioned to my own freelance design business and still carrying on with my Spread the Word tees. It’s been lots of ups and downs over the past couple of years, but I’ve learned so much. You balance a lot when you run a small business: photographer, content creator, designer, and so much more but I love every part of it!

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

Like I said earlier, I went to college for Graphic Design. Earlier in high school, I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. But one of my friends encouraged me to choose something I loved and something that I could do from anywhere, so my answer fell on being a designer. I honestly never thought that one day I would be running my own small business but I love it! My main goal in creating Spread the Word, was to be a source of encouragement and provide creative tees and apparel that supported our mission. So having that goal, it changed the content of what we from just being sales-y to “how can we encourage our followers and customers to know Jesus, and how can we spread the word about him?” We may not be a big booming business bringing in tons of sales each day, but I can’t tell you how many people have bought a shirt or sweatshirt and said how much it meant to them or how it started up a conversation about Jesus. And I’d so much rather be all about that and encouraging our customers rather than only focused on making sales.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

So designing and creating our own apparel at first seemed like something where we would have to send off our art to be screenprinted by another source (which we did do at first). But, after about a year or so of doing that, we decided to take out the middle man and branch out with buying our own heat press and doing things that way! It was a bit of trial and error at first, but I experimented with vinyl and then ordering my own transfers. We ordered the heat press from Heat press nation but there’s lots of resources out there and options when it comes to heat presses. We also found a company (Transfer Express) that makes screen printed transfers which we found to be durable and easy for big batches of orders or shirts.

The really nice thing about doing everything ourselves with a heat press is that I’ve been able to do lots of custom orders for groups or individuals. Yes it is more work than sending off shirts to be screen printed but it’s definitely paid off in being able to do custom orders!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Honestly, I did work a full time job at a boutique which turned into starting our t-shirt brand (in addition to the boutique). But after a few years of working that, the boutique closed down but I kept our t-shirt brand (Spread the Word). Having a little more free time, I decided to start up my own freelance business because I have a degree in graphic design. This was a perfect move for me because I recently became a full time mom and starting my own freelance business plus running my t-shirt brand gave me the freedom and flexibility to work from home and balance being a wife and mom. I know this isn’t for everyone but I’ve loved being able to work on my own time plus create designs for my t-shirt brand.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.stwcreative.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spreadtheword.co/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spreadthewordcreative
• Other: Those links are for my t-shirt brand but I also have my design website here https://www.lizwinfreydesign.co/

Image Credits
Some of the photos are by me (on the parking deck) And the photo of myself and group photo of me are by Mary Turner