We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kelli Kinney a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Kelli thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. Other times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed
It was 2008/2009. My husband and I were riding the wave of economic growth and success as home builders when the bottom fell out of our industry. We had put so much faith and our financial security into the banking system – and at that time individuals in our profession couldn’t lose… we had 2 toddlers and a newborn when we had to short sale our home and start completely over. We were utterly devastated and at a complete loss at what to do next. Building homes had become a huge part of our identity as a couple – so to start over was a bit of an identity crisis to say the least. Sometimes loss comes to show us that we can overcome things we thought would kill us. Sometimes it shows us that without the negative space, we wouldn’t pursue innovation or change in the same capacity as we would otherwise. For us – it brought a much needed shift that shot us into a season of growth, healing and new identity that has served us so much better than the previous storyline before our tremendous loss.
Kelli, 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?
As long as I can remember, my personality has been to create. As a little girl I had a rock collection – and every stone I captured told a story. Growing up in a family of entrepreneurs, I walked to my mom’s craft store almost every day after elementary school and lost myself in the corners and back room of that magical space. When we would visit my grandma Pat in the summers – we would inevitably stop by her yarn store and see all of the new fibers she had brought in and how it was all going in Southern California as a small business owner.
When I graduated college with a BA of fine arts, with a focus of graphic design I had no idea where that would take me. When I met and married my husband who was a residential builder at the time, I utilized my degree to help him curate spec homes and design new innovated elements that made his home build unique. When 2008/2009 hit, we lost everything as a building company and had to start completely over. I went through a major time of depression, identity crisis and found myself grasping at straws as to what to do next. When you feel you’ve lost everything – life has a way of showing you you are stronger than you think you are. I truly believe that when all hope seems lost, that’s when life’s stage is being set for the great reveal of your “comeback.” I would never have guessed that in this stage of my life I would have moved from being a design partner to my builder husband, to owning and operating multiple small business that supply the craft industry and as of 4 years ago, started my own brick and mortar shop. It turns out, those daily walks to my moms store as a kid and the summer trips to grandmas yarn shop buried a seed inside me to one day bet on my own dream to be a shop owner! Had everything gone according to plan back during the “Great Recession” I would never of had the need to diversify or go after anything different than the status quo. Change forced me onto a path of great introspection that led me to dreaming and developing the idea of opening my vintage boutique, called “The Merq.” It is located in Garden City, Idaho, and is currently in process of expanding to an old barn property my husband and I are renovating with even bigger dreams and aspirations of building something great! At this point in my journey, with all I’ve seen, experienced and dream for — I feel it’s time to go after legacy. My husband and I are hoping to develop and build businesses that will grow beyond ourselves – to generations we have not yet met. We have given ourselves permission to go after the impossible! And as we trust the open doors and respect the closed ones – we have found the adventure of it all has been worth it.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
When my husband and I saw the writing on the wall that our residential building company was not going to survive the Great Recession, we had to pivot and pivot hard in order to survive. I was a graphic designer by trade and up until then was not the bread winner by any means for our family. With the building industry crumbling and my freelance work completely dried up – I found myself in an interesting dilemma. I was a creative with no outlet. And we were flat out broke. Then something interesting happened… my SIL was getting ready to have her first baby, and I wanted to make her a special gift for her new baby – but I was broke remember – so I had to get creative. Back at that time, there was no Pinterest or even Etsy to help guide me along, but there WAS Google. So I googled “diaper bag.” Thinking I could surely manage a cute little bag for her. But being a little over the top, I also googled “purse charm.” This is where things shifted for me. When I googled “purse charm,” one of the first searches that showed up was a bottle cap purse charm. This sparked my curiously right away, as I had seen this type of craft done by a local artist who had their booth set up in the farmers market every Saturday… “I can totally do this! And it might even be fun to try my take on it!” I said to myself as I pushed BUY NOW on the website that sold bottlecaps as brewing supplies to home brewers (not crafters). After receiving that initial bag of bottlecaps and making My 1st round of bottlecap charms, I was hooked! I found myself weeks later slinging my own version of bottlecap charms and the like. So random I know. The catch to it all, was that the bottlecaps I was buying in bulk all came with the liners in them – because they were for food purposes – not crafting… This meant that in order for me to fill the bottle cap charm with my artwork and then resin, I had to heat the bottle cap on a warm surface (I used a pancake griddle and tweezers) to be able
To pull the latex liner out of the center of the cap. After many thousand of these caps we had to do this to – my husband one night said “there has to be a way to buy these WITHOUT the liners for people like me who were using them for craft purposes. But at that point in time you couldn’t – unless you bought a truckload full… being that we were still poor and living on scraps – this seemed like an impossible option. Though the course of some amazing miracles and open door opportunities, we were eventually able to buy from the only manufacturer of bottlecaps in the US, one pallet at a time (instead of a truckload at a time). That turned into us deconstructing what I was making and selling as retail items at farmers markets, to becoming a wholesale supplier of bottlecap items – so that people could buy all the items online and make what I was making at the convenience of their own home. That then led us to meeting Hobby Lobby – just one year after losing our building company – and picking up an amazing opportunity to sell our craft supplies to one of the biggest craft supply chains in the nation! That was 12 years ago – and we still sell Hobby Lobby chrome bottlecaps. We learned so much through that HUGE shift in our business day-to-day, but in hindsight it opened the door for us to continue to explore more opportunities to innovate, create and dream big! It lead me to have enough courage to go after my dream of opening a brick and mortar store just like I had dreamed of doing as a little girl. None of the journey was wasted – all of the hard ship and trials led to a greater understanding of resiliency and adventure in risk taking. I wouldn’t change any of it for a second!
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
4 years ago, I felt the nudge to go after my dream of opening my own brick and mortar shop like I had dreamed of doing as a little girl. The thing is – we were doing well with our wholesale craft supply company , and as of now all of our businesses (except as builders) we’re online. Running a brick and mortar shop was a completely new endeavor – and given our history and way of jumping into the deep end of the pool – we decided to just go for it! The concept was to run a “vintage boutique” full of antiques, vintage items and local artists/makers. The problems was, we lived in Idaho – and there are no really good antiques in ready supply… Idaho is too young of a state to have the “good stuff.” It was almost spring break and we found ourselves without any plans. My husband out of the blue says “hey, there’s a big vintage show in Texas called antiques week, we should go and see if they might have the ready supply of vintage inventory we’d need to start the store!” You didn’t need to tell me twice! So we booked 5 tickets – packed our family of 5 on a plane and flew to San Antonio. We were flying by the seat of our pants – no idea what we were doing – but confident enough that this trip would either be a home run or a really epic adventure. Either way we felt it was worth the risk. When we arrived in San Antonio, we still had a 2 1/2 hr drive to the rural town of Roundtop, TX where we would be shopping for the Antiques week event. We were going to be driving our vintage goods home, so my husband figured we should probably just invest in a 20ft trailer to load all the stuff we were going to find into… that evolved into us driving to a strange farm lot in the middle of the night, in San Antonio to inspect and buy a used 20 ft cargo trailer that we hoped would make the trek with us as we started our unknown adventure. The trailer checked out – we hooked it up to the rental car and headed down the pitch black road to try and find our Airbnb in the middle of the night – with plans of starting shopping the next morning… after some trial-by-error travel instructions, and almost missing the dirt road turnoff to our accommodation – we rested up for the night and headed into the rural town of Roundtop the next morning. We woke up to the most amazing scene: fishing pond in the backyard, fresh coffee brewing in the coffee pot and sunlight to help us navigate our surroundings so.much.better than the middle of the night experience. We had heard rumors of this antique show – but it’s one thing to hear about it, another to actually experience it for yourself! Always go the route of experiencing for yourself – you never know what you could be missing out on… When we pulled into town, the little road sign that said “Roundtop – population 90” was a small indicator of the reality of what this bi-annual show had done to this tiny rural Texas town.. what was typically a town of 90 residents most of the year, grew to a whopping 150,000 when this antiques week show was in full effect! 50 years ago, this concept of a vintage antiques show was born by a local woman named Emma Lee Turney, who in fall of 1968 created a 2 day show that grew to what it is today! After understanding the moment of that decision by Emma and how that one decision could grow to such capacity all these years later – my eyes were forever opened to the power of what a “yes” can mean to not only yourself, but so many others. Because of Emma’s “yes” to starting this show 50 years ago, my family was able to go in an adventure of a lifetime and start our own journey of faith into the vintage industry because this tiny rural town became the hosting site to vendors from all over the world! We ate it up! We had the time of our lives – and our kids were the only ones roaming the cow pastures-turned-vintage tents full of items of curiosities and more, to their little hearts contentment. We didn’t know it then, but we were teaching our kids to dream, have fun, and write themselves into the storyline of our new adventure in retail that then involved us all! We were beginning to build legacy in our business – and our hearts could hardly contain the excitement at building something completely brand new to us in a foreign industry. I became “love drunk” on the notion that I could find items of yesteryear and being them new life – all the while telling the story of where they came from. After 1 week immersing ourselves into the culture of vintage, junkin’, pickin’, all of it – we loaded up our 20ft trailer and headed the 3 day road trip back home to Idaho to see if we could make a go of this new concept of a “vintage boutique” in our town. That was 4 years ago – and we’ve not looked back once! And Roundtop has become a twice a year shopping trip for our family that has become one of the most fun adventures of it all!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.themerq.com
- Instagram: @the_merq
- Facebook: Www.Facebook/themerq