We were lucky to catch up with Jennifer (Denise) Ortiz recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jennifer (Denise), thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?
Dneecey’s started as a way to make a little extra money for my family when we really needed it. I’ll never forget my fiancé and I staying up til like 3 in the morning cutting out sticker labels and preparing for my first event.
I initially was only going to sell bath bombs, a venture I’d started after my fiancé made me some as a gift one year. He said I’d really enjoy making them and he was right.
After I started making bath bombs I fell in love with making all sorts of all natural, vegan products from: scrubs, to lip balms, body butter, bath salts and more.
After my first event where I didn’t even have a table cloth or any kinds of displays to think of (shout out to my friend Danielle for coming through) I hit the ground running and signed up for any and every event I could find.
It was truly a labor of love not only for me but also for my family. You’d often find me and my daughter setting up at events while my fiancé was watching our other children. He’s also been the one designing my labels, logo, and helping with social media and website etc.
We make all of our labels in house and all of us were cutting stickers out one by one for every product we had. And we had a lot! As an autism mom I quickly learned the benefits of CBD and started making CBD products.
Growing with Dneecey’s has changed what my idea of healing truly is. And then Covid happened.
During that time I began back on my own path of a spiritual, personal, and cultural healing journey. I began to learn about doing things with intention, got back to my roots of herbs as medicine, learned about crystals and energy, and started studying and practicing divination.
Then I did something I’d been intimidated to do from the start, I made my first candles. These weren’t just any candles either. I made candles with intention and I fell in love.
My fiancé and I began to practice manifestation and sat down to make a plan of how to take Dneecey’s to the next level.
It’s my goal and the goal of our company to give back to the community that helped create me. My desire is to help others on their own personal journey of self love and self healing, whatever that looks like. And highlight my culture and bring awareness to the necessity of mental health and breaking generational cycles.
Jennifer (Denise), 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?
This does go back to what I wrote for the first response. What I think sets me apart is also what I think helps people feel like they can relate to me and that is that I pour so much of myself into what I do. I tie everything into each other like a woven blanket, from each carefully selected ingredient in my candles, down to the hand chosen products, references to my culture, nods to my predecessors and more. My main goal is to help others on their journey however that may be. I honestly believe there is room for everyone at the table and being a small business owner has made me believe that even more. My desire is to use my knowledge and my products to remind people of the power and energy they have within to help them reach their goals.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
When I first started out I had no idea what I was doing, so I took a lot of risks. I didn’t know what I didn’t know so I just took a dive into the rabbit hole. I followed all of the vendors I met at events on Instagram and started messaging them and watching all of their stories keeping an eye out for vendor opportunities coming up. I started following event coordinators and taking all sorts of events all over San Antonio. I posted everything I could tagging as many people as I could. Every weekend I did multiple shows, til people started to recognize my logo and my face. I also made it a habit to make videos and shout out my other vendor associates. It was a job within a job but I have always been genuine in wanting to help others grow while I grew.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
When Covid happened things were pretty hard and we hit a rough patch like most people did. During that time and for a bit after I was reeling from the passing of my father and had some very serious health issues. We ended up having to close our storefront and even had a time where we asked our community for help to keep us afloat. During that time I stopped doing as many events and we took to selling via story sales, selling wholesale, and online. It led us to decide to readjust how I was spending my energy and how we would move forward as a company. We recently revamped our logo, redesigned our look, consolidated our brand, and have been very careful of what we are intentionally putting out on our social medias. We’ve also joined Amazon small business and have two of our candle lines listed on that site.