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

Jennifer , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

Birch and Belle is currently run by my family and I. It’s made up of myself, my dad, and my brother. I am all about family business but I will say that it might not be for everyone. I’m lucky that I have such a good relationship with them. I’m aware that everyone might not have this special relationahiop and it’s the most impoprtant aspect of a successfully run family business. You need to be able to have a voice and be okay with disagrements. It will happen and that’s okay! We rarely have disagreements beacuse we are all very similar in our personalities, our drive, and out work force. We honesly have the best time together and it’s been such a pleasure working side by side on a daily basies. We are a well oiled machine and I can’t imagine doing this with anyone else.

Jennifer , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

When I first formed Birch and Belle, I knew I wanted to open a business with my family. We are all very close and we are some of the hardest working people you will know. My dad, Jerry and brother, Chris, were on board when I said I wanted to start a business together. My brother came up with the crazy idea to buy a laser machine and the rest is history. Birch and Belle is a laser wood cutting business. We specialize in wedding props, nursery decor, party decor, realtor gifts, and photography props. The thing that makes us stand out is that we are willing to do custom orders. Most of the local orders we recieve are custom. Usually someone calls me up with an idea and I take that idea and bring it to life. I have definitely stretched my creativity over the last few years and I have surprised myself. People love custom work and everyone wants something different. The party theme market is huge these days. It seems like every party has a theme to go along with it. Finding coordinating and unique decor isn’t always easy so that’s where we step in. I’m usually just as excited as the customer so I’m pretty easy to work with. It’s usually a fun experience for everyone involved. Family and service of others are the core values of our business, and our mission is to create cherished items that will warm your heart and enhance your home.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I would say word of mouth has been our number one form of building our local reputation. Which is such a huge compliment. Once a customer tags our business on social media, someone new will follow within a few hours. I am a former teacher so I have a lot of teacher friends who love to order signs. I made a few door hangers for some local teachers, and now almost every classsroom door at that school has one of my signs. It seems like the local market is more of a domino effect.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We mainly sell on Etsy. Etsy has been incredibly helpful to get our business up and running. They are a wonderful platform that helps you bring in traffic to your website. Since opening, we have started selling on Amazon and Shopify as well. It’s been a bit of a struggle building up traffic on these other sites so Etsy is still our largest market. We hope to learn more about driving traffic to these other websites as we grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.BirchandBelle.com
• Instagram: @BirchandBelle
• Facebook: @BirchandBelle
• Other: Etsy.com/shop/birchandbelle

Image Credits
Elyse Anna Photography (Elyse Loiacono)