We recently connected with Jaime Coast and have shared our conversation below.

Jaime, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I recently rebranded my company to Cotton & Bow. There were a lot of factors that went into the decision on the rebrand, the name, the look, and the values I wanted to communicate. Here are three values I wanted the name of my business to convey.

1. Quality – I wanted to communicate quality and our attention to the materials that go into each and every Cotton & Bow product. Chiefly, our 100% cotton paper and chiffon ribbon from our best seller – handmade paper place cards with bows.

2. Longevity – I wanted the name to stand alone and represent all of the work my team puts into the business, not just my own. So I gave the company a name that wasn’t reliant on my personal name. In the future, if I sell the business I didn’t want to give anyone pause that the brand wasn’t strong enough to stand on its own. And the new name allows me to build a brand that has no hinderance to its growth or scale. It also communicates that we are a true heritage brand that creates heirloom quality products and services that can stand the test of time.

3. Clarity – My former brand sometimes confused customers and they didn’t know what we sold just by the name. At the end of the day, all wedding invitations and stationery made of basic building blocks – paper and ribbon. Thus Cotton & Bow represents the core essence of the products we create and the materials we transform into something beyond the basic.

Jaime, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

“I just want to make cool sh*t!” as we used to say in my advertising agency days.

Before I started a wedding stationery brand, I worked in corporate marketing for 15 years. I started in the agency world as a social media strategist and then moved over to partnerships at Nickelodeon, and eventually supported Paramount’s full portfolio of brands (MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, CBS, etc.) as a Sr. Director of Partnerships.

I’ve always been someone who is drawn to being creative. But I’m also an intensely focused person with a high propensity for action. So talking about the work is never going to satisfy me as much as doing the work. Every career move I’ve made has been fueled by a desire to make, push my own boundaries, learn new things, and achieve something tangible.

I started my business in 2017 as a side hobby with the intent of having a creative outlet. At the time, my current role was already fairly creative and I was working on client projects with brands like Fruit of the Loom, Mountain Dew, or Hasbro to build out large scale activations and marketing creative featuring Paramount’s brands or Talent. But I was looking for an excuse to paint more and I knew having an assignment in the form of commissioned work would help me stay accountable.

Eventually in 2019 and 2020, circumstances led me to re-examine my career and the life I had built. I had my first child, a girl, in the beginning of 2019 and my Father passed away a few months later unexpectedly. My Dad was someone who greatly looked forward to retirement. He worked for the weekends and summer vacations. He normalized the idea that your life begins again when you retire and you work solely for the money to pay for things – the more money, the better – not enjoyment. Cancer took his retirement from him after only three of his golden years.

Then in 2020, less than a year after his death, COVID happened. I was already feeling burnt out from the daily commute, the adjustment to life as a new mom and grieving daughter, the consolidation of the media industry that lead to less “cool sh*t” and more logo-slapping partnerships. COVID, as awful as it was, was somewhat of a relief for me personally. A chance to pause. I welcomed my second daughter and really had the chance to get to know my first.

It was this whirlwind of two years that had me really thinking about how to enjoy my life now, while I was living it, and not solely hope for a future period of enjoyment. I wanted to create things that had meaning, I wanted to contribute to the world something lasting and meaningful, and I wanted to spend time with my family, having the flexibility I needed to live a less stressful existence.

I started to put effort into my side hobby to turn it into a full-fledged business and saw promising, early success. Within a year, I was making enough consistently to leave my six-figure corporate job and try my hand at full-time entrepreneurship. Now, I spend my days illustrating my client’s love stories and providing non-cookie-cutter stationery for weddings and other events at Cotton & Bow.

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

Turning my side hustle into a full time business was no easy feat. So I’d love to share how I did it. There are three main shifts you need to make when you decide to become your own boss.

First, you need to decide to treat your side hustle like a business and not a hobby. This is shockingly hard to do at first. You want to buy all of the cute stuff to create more and more products. You want to paint whatever you feel like after a long day at work. You want to focus on all of the parts you like, and ignore the parts you don’t (looking at you, bookkeeping and sales calls.) But you have to decide and commit to being disciplined and focusing on the activities that drive growth and strength in your business.

Second, you need to prepare for a temporary loss or decline in income. They number one thing that allowed me to take the leap into my business full time was a healthy savings account. I personally had $50,000 in liquid assets and an additional $30,000 in stocks that I used to support me and the growth of my business in the first year. Do you need $80k to start a business? Absolutely not! Your freedom number may be a lot lower or even higher than mine. I live in a high cost of living area with two kids and a husband who had a stable job. So I needed more than someone who doesn’t have kids, or who can live with parents for a while. But I also needed less than someone who doesn’t have a business that makes a ton of profit already. Calculate a number that could sustain your minimum lifestyle needs for six months and work towards saving that amount before you dive in and quit your 9-5.

Third, when you get to the point where you need to scale and grow your business, you actually need to do less and not more. I’ll explain. My current business is making multiple six figures in revenue, six figures of profit and on its way to seven figures of revenue with a multi-six figure profit. I got here by focusing on one customer problem, one product solution, and one marketing strategy at a time. Any time I’ve ventured too far into multiple things, the business growth has stalled. The truth is you don’t need to be on Instagram and TikTok and Pinterest, selling wholesale, and licensing, and custom commissions, and direct to consumer, and, and, and. You just need to focus on 1 product, sold to 1 type of person, selling 1 way until you reach the maximum capacity for that channel. In many cases, the capacity is much larger than you think. You can make $100k or even $1M in revenue on one platform with one product line for one core audience. So don’t branch out too soon and spread yourself too thin to make progress anywhere. Focus on getting good with one and how to automate or delegate it before you move on to another.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The most effective strategy for growing my clientele is by focusing on sales. This was a difficult lesson for me to learn, coming from a marketing background. I knew marketing really really well and I poured a lot of effort into it. I know that fellow creatives don’t always like sales or want to be sales-people. Marketing seems a lot more fun and stimulating for creative brains.

But marketing is not what brings new customers in, or even closes the deal, sales does. And learning which activities are sales-driving and which ones are marketing-driving is crucial. Sending an email to potential customers about how you can solve their problem? That’s sales. Focusing on SEO and driving traffic to your business through market places like Etsy, and Amazon? That’s also sales. Inviting potential customers to get on the phone with you multiple times per week? Sales.

Updating your website is not sales. Posting on social media is not sales. (I know it seems like going viral will solve everything! But most people don’t use social media to sell and they don’t know how. So I promise you’re likely wasting time here with a social media MARKETING strategy instead of a social media SALES strategy.) Writing a blog post is not sales. And I could go on with 100 other things that seem like they will move the needle for you but they are also not sales.

Stop doing marketing activities and expecting it to result in revenue. Sales and marketing work hand-in-hand. Marketing is how your position your offering to appeal to your desired client. Sales is bringing potential clients in to see your marketing and showing them how your offering is perfectly positioned to them.

Marketing is deciding what ice cream flavors to make, what they should be called, how to price them, deciding whether to position them as a low calorie, healthy option or the most flavorful, delectable thing to grace your customers’ lips, calories be damned. Sales is taking your ice cream to the beach on a hot summer day and showing it off to hungry, sweaty people. If you never do the second thing, you’ll never sell any ice cream. If you accidentally take your ice cream to a deserted park in winter, you’ll also never sell any ice cream. Getting sales right matters. A LOT.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cottonandbow.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cottonandbowpaper

Image Credits

Bri Cibene @bricibene