We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lane and Noemia Poole a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lane and Noemia, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear how you think where to draw the line in terms of asking friends and family to support your business – what’s okay and what’s over the line?

Most of our business has come from friends and family. They know us personally and feel comfortable supporting us. We don’t have a physical shop but we do go to craft shows. Most of the time, we barely cover the cost of the booth. We also sell online but it is very competitive and hard to get visibility. Back to friends and family, we feel like giving them a lower price than we would for someone we do not know. Usually, it is the friends and family offering to support us instead of us asking for their support. We don’t want to sound like we are begging, but we do appreciate their support. We have gotten customers because of referrals by friends and family.

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.

After I, Lane, lost my job in December, 2020 due to layoffs, we started looking for others sources of income. We actually started before my layoff because I was given an advance notice of my layoff. My hobby is woodworking which I picked up from my father. Noemia had taken some craft classes in her home country of Brazil before we were married and this started to be her hobby. We had been considering a business for a few years and decided to make it official in October, 2020 when we finally registered our small business as “Lane and Noemia Creations LLC” with the state of Florida. We recently created a mission statement after skimming through a book about small businesses. “Our mission is to enrich people’s lives and to brighten the atmosphere of their homes and offices through the placement of our products.” We have a vinyl cutting machine, a CNC machine with both laser and router, and several woodworking machines. I enjoy coming up with unique solutions to problems. One such solution was to create a way to have retractable feet on a wooden photo backdrop wall so that it could be folded in half when not being used. I have also created designs using design software such as a man walking inside a large gear to move to hands on a clock. This design is depicted on one of our products called “Time Marches On . . .” Our primary focus at the time is to take photos of nature and to post them on several websites. These websites place our photos on various products such as prints, apparel, pillows, puzzles, travel bags, etc.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Both of us had a life-long dream of being married. Noemia is from Brazil and had been a missionary all over the world. Lane had never been out of the United States except for a few hours in the Bahamas during spring break of his senior year in college. We both are very serious about our faith and prayed for many years for a spouse. All of our friends were getting married and we were still single. Each of us had a friend to strongly encourage us to try online dating. We both felt uncomfortable with the idea of meeting someone online, but both of us finally decided to give it a try. We each tried several different websites and finally we both ended up on ChristianCafe.com. We met there on February 1, 2009. I was 44 and she was 46. After several months of communicating with each other through emails and Skype, Noemia tried to come to the US for us to meet in person but she was denied a visa by the US government. At that point, I decided to go to Brazil in October, 2009 to meet her. After getting to know each other better in person for about a week, I asked her to marry me and she said yes.. In order to get a fiancée visa, Noemia need a police report from every country she had lived in for more than six months. Some countries were easy and some were very difficult to get this report. Finally, she was able to come to the US in early September, 2010. In approximately two weeks, we planned the entire wedding and were married on September 25, 2010.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We purchased a vinyl cutting machine and started making home decor products. I, Lane, would prepare the wood in my workshop to accept the vinyl designs. When then moved on to shirts after we purchased a heat press. Now we could place our vinyl designs and photos on shirts and tote bags. We also tried printable heat transfer paper. We ended up with an Etsy shop. We started by posting products that we would make and ship ourselves. We then discovered Print on Demand (POD). Now, we could upload our designs and photos and select products from our POD partner. They would place our designs and photos on shirts and other products and ship them for us. We decided to order one of our own products from our Etsy shop as if we were a customer. We discovered that professionally made products had better quality than we could achieve at home. Since then, we have discovered several eCommerce websites that we could open a shop have have our designs and photos placed on various products. They cover the production and shipping while we provide the designs and photos. We have had very few customers but we are continuing to try. Once we get better noticed, we feel we will have many more customers.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.laneandnoemiacreations.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lgmn_poole_photos
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/noemiaandlane.poole
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-noemia-poole-18398157
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/LaneAndNoemia
• Other: noemia-poole.pixels.com LNPhotos.redbubble.com https://society6.com/lanenoemiaphotos https://noemiapoole.pictorem.com https://weawow.com/m/NoemiaPoole https://www.pinterest.com/nlpoole2010 https://www.pinterest.com/noemiavs63 https://www.shutterstock.com/g/Noemia+Poole

Image Credits
The images titles include the website the image is from.