We were lucky to catch up with Geeta Buckley recently and have shared our conversation below.

Geeta, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

I’m a huge believer in working with family! No one is going to care more about the “family business” than family members. Our business is definitely a family owned business. My husband and I started the business 15 years ago when we had young children and now, my 2 adult boys, adult daughter, daughter in law, and brother all work for us and it’s so much fun! I find myself wanting to grow my business just so that I can leave something successful for them to run when I retire. Creating a business that supports my family is extremely rewarding and motivating. I can also be honest and upfront with family much easier than I can with my other employees who aren’t family. It’s very refreshing!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have always loved design! I always knew that I would do something in the design industry when I “grew up”. And oddly enough, I was always drawn to window treatments, even as a teenager. I noticed them and was intrigued by them. I actually worked in the JC Penny drapery department when I was in college but I never thought that I would end up owning a window covering business! Growing up I was a pretty good seamstress and even made a big puffy balloon shade for my room when I was a teenager. When I was a newlywed I sewed window treatments for my little apartment and then it branched out to friends and family. It was a way to make a few extra dollars when I was a stay at home mom with 4 kids. But then in 2007 I got a chance to sew window treatments for a new designer in town. She was working on a model home and needed my help. After doing a few homes with her, it just made sense to me that I should provide blinds along with the soft window treatments that I was sewing. So I googled blind businesses and found the Budget Blinds website and started the process with a recruiter. A few weeks after contacting them, my husband came home from his job of 10 years and told me that because of the hard financial time that the country was in (it was 2009), he had been demoted to sales and was going to take a 50% pay cut. So of course we took a big risk and cashed out our 401 k and bought our Budget Blinds franchise. It was incredibly risky and scary. Neither my husband or I knew anything about owning a business. We really struggled for about 3 years before we even made a profit. But we were determined and had no other options at that time. A huge blessing that came with buying the business was access to some of the best workrooms in the country that sewed beautiful draperies and roman shades and rod companies that made amazing custom rods. I no longer had to stay up late at night sewing window treatments for clients. I had time to network and make connections with designers and I did just that. I created so many relationships with amazing designers that loved what my husband and I did. We were hard working, honest, and were passionate about our products. You could say that we are both perfectionists when it comes to our window treatments looking good! It was also extremely helpful that I had a great eye for design and could execute what ever each designer wanted. As our business grew, we out grew our Budget Blinds business. We had felt limited in what we really wanted to do and how we wanted to run our company and so a few years into owning our franchise, we started Uptown Drapes and were thriving with that. We eventually sold our Budget Blinds franchise and hit the ground running. By then we had a lot of requests to do out of state work. I tried helping out of state clinets but just didn’t have a good system. Then the idea came to me to build a website that helped those clients out or state and do it in a simple, easy to understand way. Again I had no idea how to build a website or what was involved in doing that! And I have to say that I’m glad I didn’t know how challenging, expensive and time consuming it would be because I probably wouldn’t have done it if I knew. But 5 years after starting the process, I’m very glad I did it. It’s still not perfect and it’s always being worked on, but it has added a lot to our local business and had provided a whole other level of creativity and excitement! Our website only sells, drapes, rods, and romans. Just 3 products but the 3 most important window coverings products in my opinion. A person can get basic blinds anywhere really but to find good drapes, rods, and romans, is very rare, and so that’s why we only sell those 3 items on line. But locally we sell absolutely anything and everything you can put on a window. What sets us apart from other companies is the fact that I am very selective with the products that we sell! I do not want to sell something to a client that I wouldn’t put in my own home. So I spend a lot of time and do a lot of research to find that products that represent Uptown Drapes. We have a look that people like and want. There is a lot of details to know about window treatments and we know how overwhelming it can be for designers and clients to do it on their own. We take a lot of the guess work and confusion out of it. I want all of our clients to not be worried about what they are going to get from us when we come to hang their window treatments or what will be delivered if they are ordering on line. We have worked hard to gain a good reputation and that is very important to me! I never want to be too big that we stop caring about quality and good customer service. I would rather loose out on money than to leave a customer unhappy. Locally I have never ever advertised! We are all word of mouth and so my reputation is everything to me! The only advertising we do outside of Utah is Instagram. That has been an amazing way to get our name out there and for free! It has also done wonders for our local business which is something I didn’t expect to happen. There are 2 things I am most proud of. The second one is being able to buy a building 3 years ago after working out of our basement for 12 years. We bought it when it was being renovated by a developer and so I was able to create and design it exactly how I wanted, and I feel as though it reflects us as a business perfectly! There really is some truth to the saying “if you build it they will come” Our business has increased tremendously since being in our building! But the first thing I’m most proud of is being able to employee my family. I never thought we would be able to support ourselves back in the Budget Blinds days let alone support 3 of our adult kids, a daughter in law and my brother. Not to mention the other 6 employees we have. It is mind blowing to look around at these people who I love and know that we have created a place for them to come to each day and making a living for their families. It truly is my biggest accomplishment! I know that surrounding yourself with good people who work hard and care is the best way to grow a business and to have joy along the way!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I’m definitely not an expert on social media! I was about 50 years old when we started our instagram account and I didn’t know anything about it or how it even worked. I didn’t even have a personal instagram account. At first I just wanted for all of our content to be professional and I didn’t want to be the face of our business. Plus, I felt awkward in front the the camera and felt like I was too old and people wouldn’t be interested in me or my business. But I realized that the accounts that I liked had people in them that I like seeing regardless if it was a personal account or a business account. So I slowly started filming myself talking about our business and the products we offered. We could see that our followers were more engaged when I would do a story or reel. So I continued to put myself out there and after some time I got a little more comfortable and confident about it all. I remember once we got a $10,000.00 order on our website and this person had not even contacted us first before placing their order. Usually on an order that big, they will reach out with a question or a little guidance. And so we sent them an email thanking them for their order and asked them if there were any questions they might have about the order they just placed. They responded back and said that they had been watching me on Instagram for a while and felt very confident about our products and how to order because they trusted me. That was a huge compliment and made me realize that our followers were paying attention to our business and products and I was a good one to bring that awareness to them. I’ve learned that if I’m passionate about what I’m talking about on Instagram, my audience will feel that. We have branched out a little bit and made some fun reels and stories that are more personal and funny. Our audience really likes those. We recently did a reel about “when your daughter becomes a mother for the first time” and it went viral. It has been viewed 2.1 million times which is crazy to all of us but also so much fun! We also have a lot of engagement when I do a D.I.Y. project and post it as a story or reel on our Instagram. So we make sure our Instagram is mostly business related with a little extra thrown in here and there. We have also had success collaborating with influencers. That can be a tricky thing to get into and somewhat of a risk. But if you find the right influencer, it can be very worth it. We have learned to be very picky and selective when choosing to work with an influencer.

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

We do not manufacture our products. But before we started our business, I was sewing draperies and roman shades from my home for a very small clientele. I was not an expert on how to do it and so it was very time consuming and I’m sure the quality was just average. But having that background and knowledge was and still is extremely helpful now that we have manufactures sewing our products. To this day, I will on occasion take a product home with me and fix it or tweak it rather than sending it back to our manufacture. I am able to talk the same language as our manufactures because of my sewing knowledge. It’s very easy for me to communicate with our manufactures because I speak their language and can 100% visualize any situation we might be dealing with. I also know what can and can’t be done when it comes to sewing and so I’m able to be realistic with my manufactures about expectations we have of them. I know that we have the best manufactures in the country! We have a long going positive relationship with them that is crucial to building and maintaining a business. I consider them a part of our team and I am respectful and grateful for them and all that they do! Me and my team treat them with kindness and respect 100% of the time and they do the same in return. When you have a great relationship with your manufacturer, it makes the world of difference! I couldn’t be as successful as I am without them! During Covid, our regular manufactures who are out of state really cut back on production. But here in Utah, we were booming in our business and our manufactures just couldn’t keep up. Our lead times were double what they normally were and so we had to reach out to other manufactures to keep up with our pace. We found some other manufactures to help fill in the gaps but It was then and there that I realized how important quality and consistency and a strong relationship was and that it’s worth the wait to have things done right!

Contact Info:

• Website: uptowndrapes.com
• Instagram: uptowndrapes
• Facebook: uptown drapes
• Youtube: Uptown Drapes

Image Credits
Hillary Joyce Photography