Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kerry Powers. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Kerry thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the toughest things about entrepreneurship is that there is almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?

Covid was the most unexpected, impactful event for our small business, and I definitely don’t mean to minimize what was such a traumatic event for so many people by saying that. I took over as owner (although I managed the business for a few years beforehand) in March 2020, the month that Virginia closed businesses for safety during Covid. Concerns over how to keep the business open were paramount. During this time, the shop had very little social media presence, zero online shopping opportunities for our customers and I immediately begin thinking of ways we could operate safely and efficiently. Within the first few weeks of owning the business AND closing our doors to customers I focused my time towards creating a website where our customers could shop online. We held live online sales, grew our social media presence, introduced new products and offered personal by-appointment shopping experiences when the opportunity arose. We tried to keep our customers and community close by sharing information and events around our small town and supporting other small businesses as much as we could.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m Kerry, owner of Belle Jar Design in historic Clifton, Virginia. It’s been a crazy ride to get to this point! My husband is retired military now, but for 20 years we moved around every few years and I searched out fulfilling and fun opportunities for myself everywhere we landed. I earned my Bachelors degree in Virginia, married my husband and moved to Texas, earned my Masters degree in Washington state while working at a crisis nursery there, worked for the State of Florida reuniting families, learned to sail, surf and all about aloha in Hawaii, and raised two amazing kids living and travelling all over the country. After relocating all of us to northern Virginia to what was my husband’s last duty station, I had the opportunity to help out a friend at her little shop in Clifton. She handed over the reigns to me when new opportunities came her way, and since then it’s been my pleasure to offer a one of a kind, vintage-loving, unique, treasure-hunting shopping experience in Northern Virginia. I have an amazing team working with me to curate (and create) a shop full of special pieces to make your home absolutely yours. All of the refinished furniture in the shop we do ourselves, and we also offer custom services. Belle Jar Design has called Clifton home for 9 years now, and I have been owner for almost 5 of those. I am excited to continue to share the magic that is Belle Jar with you. Shop small, shop local, and keep it out of a landfill!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We really built our social media from scratch. I have three main vendors that help me curate items for the shop, and we started to heavily collaborate on all the posts that originate from Belle Jar Design. That sharing model helped build our audience. We use hashtags for any products we use when refurbishing our furniture and have experienced some spotlights for our shop that way. I think the most impactful is knowing that our social media does not necessarily convert to sales for us, but definitely converts to eyes on the shop and our treasures. I keep our posts light, personal and as genuine as I can. I try not to saturate our followers with ‘sales ads’ but instead highlight our thanks for their support and sneak peaks of what’s new in the shop – and with our small business neighbors. I’ve found that keeping the focus of our social media on what we do well, and not comparing our presence to others has kept the stress off posting and has kept it fun.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

We were really struggling before Covid, and although it feels strange to say, that whole event provided us a unique opportunity to really think about what we wanted the business to be if we could keep the doors open. As we struggled with all of the scary unknowns (both personally and professionally) I thought about ways to grow – even as I feared having to close. In the end and through collaborative brainstorming with my other vendors, I decided to pull in more items, another main vendor, and expand our inventory so we could appeal to a wider range of customers. These somewhat small changes kept us financially safe and provided us an opportunity to connect with more people in the community who may have felt like we couldn’t offer them anything previously. Although it felt like a risk at first, we ended up growing our business exponentially in the following years.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bellejardesign.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bellejardesign/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bellejardesign

Image Credits

Fusion Mineral Paint