We were lucky to catch up with Jenny Williams recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jenny, appreciate you joining us today. One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?
I’ve always felt a special connection to my customers (whom I call Kindred Spirits) because the reason they buy my products is that they share my love of literary heroine classics! I also came into this role after two jobs back to back that weren’t really me and that I didn’t want to make careers out of, so I feel indebted to my customers. They are the only reason I have my dream job! A couple things I do to show my customers I appreciate them:
1) I include a handwritten note with every single order. I think it’s important to go the extra mile to thank people who choose to support a small business in a world overly saturated with more “convenient” options. There are a lot of things I can’t do as a huge company, but there are also things I can do as a small business that a large company could never do. I try to dwell in that space and come up with ideas from that angle.
2) My email list is where I feel most connected to my customers. I use it to alert customers of sales, of course, but I also try to remember why they are buying from me in the first place. They love to read, they love stories, they love creative businesses, and they love sharing strong female role models with their daughters and students. I try to remember these things when I send out my emails, and I think my customers appreciate being seen as a person, not just a potential buyer.
Jenny, 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 graduated college with a B.A. in history, thinking I would be a political speech writer or something else having to do with politics. I moved to Washington, D.C. and worked in the Senate for two and a half years, but I knew about half way through it wasn’t my calling. I wanted to write, but not under someone else’s name or having to get three people to approve my writing before it could be seen by others. I spent a few more years feeling very lost, career wise, until I moved back to my home state of Oklahoma with my husband, where we started fresh, at a much slower pace of life.
I was pregnant with our first daughter, and I longed for a creative job I could do from home. One of the things I was most looking forward to about becoming a mom, was reading to my daughter. My business started because I wanted my daughter’s nursery to have not just a general “book theme”, but a “literary heroine” theme. I couldn’t find anything I was looking for online, so I drew a few portraits of my favorite literary heroines and strung them on a banner for her wall.
That seed was watered over the next few months, and when my daughter was seven months old, I opened my Etsy shop with just ten prints (five portraits and five corresponding quotes), and the Literary Heroine Banner. Slowly but surely, I started to get sales and a following of customers who wanted to see more. So I kept creating for them! I am not a trained artist, though I’ve always loved to draw, so I experienced a lot of “growing pains” as my ideas seem to always be a few steps ahead of my skill level.
This month my shop is celebrating eight years and while I’m so proud I’ve made it this far, the most exciting thing for me is that in the past year, I’ve been able to see my biggest creative dream become a reality: I wrote a book! It’s called Eat Like a Heroine (End Game Press, 2024) and I co-wrote it with my good friend and seasoned author, Lorilee Craker. It’s all about what we modern heroines can learn about nourishing and flourishing from our favorite heroine classics. It was an absolute joy to write, and I can’t wait for it to be out in the world.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Like every other business owner, I started my business with the desire to grow. But a few years in, I started feeling some tension between my role as artist, and my role as business owner. While these two roles can definitely be compatible, they inherently have different goals. An artist wants to earn a living from her work, but an artist wants to be true to herself above all things. This is why we have “starving artists”. As a business owner, I obviously don’t want to do anything that compromises my integrity, but the measure of success for a business is pretty straight forward. I’m thankful I’ve been able to manage both roles, but at one point, I had to decide which was more important to me: being an artist, or being a business owner. I chose the former, and this meant that my measures of success weren’t as straight forward. There have been points in my business journey where I felt like I was walking blindly. For a while I wondered if I was making the right choices for my business and myself, and then I got my book deal.
I hope to continue to write books for the rest of my life, and this is just the beginning of that journey. But it doesn’t mean the end of my business journey. Now I get to look creatively at weaving the two together, and that’s exciting to me. My role as a creative feels a lot like the path of many of my favorite literary heroines! The heroine’s journey is never straight forward, and it is always darkest before the dawn.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
The motto for my shop is “be the heroine of you life”, which comes from a quote Nora Ephron’s mother always used to say to her: “Above all, be the heroine of you life, not the victim”. This is also my life motto, and it’s steered me away from self-pity and resignation of “the way things are”, many times!
Contact Info:
- Website: artistjennywilliams.com
- Instagram: CarrotTopPaperShop
- Other: Patreon: patreon.com/artistjennywilliams
Image Credits
Copyright Carrot Top Paper Shop 2023