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

Hi Laney, thanks for joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

To be successful, is really determined by yourself. Success is going to look different for everyone, and it will constantly evolve as you grow. As you reach your goals, you set new goals and push yourself even farther.

To me, I find success in many ways. Reaching a goal is just one type of success for me. Checking tasks off my to do list for the day and having an accomplished day is successful to me. I may not find my day to be successful everyday, but thats okay and thats why theres always a new day ahead of you.

Theres small ways that I find success, and big ways. Some success is found rather quickly, and some takes a lot of time and effort.

I am always striving to have a successful business, which means reaching my goals. Goals are so important to success for me.

Laney, 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?

From a young age, I have always been entrepreneurial. I loved playing business lady and owning some type of small business in my imagination. That love never faded as I grew up and I eventually found myself creating small businesses in my teen years. I would create jewelry or art to sell. I went from one hobby to another until I eventually found a love for photography, which was the start of my first official small business. For years, I grew my business into a successful business that is still going today.

Several years back though, I started to develop a love for home decor. I began to dream about owning a home decor boutique one day. I created Pinterest boards for what my shop would look like and what I would make and sell. It was really just a dream until several months ago when my future mother in law (who has great taste in home decor) started to share that interest in a home decor business with me.

We talked about it, dreamed about it, until one day I decided I was going to go for it. I registered us as an official business, started researching, created a small online presence, and signed us up for our first pop up event. We started to work on our inventory, slowly but surely building it up until we had our first pop up shop.

It was a small pop up, and while we didn’t have many sales, we did learn a lot and made some vendor friends. Our second pop up event was a short one, but it was a major confidence boost when we did very well. Then, our third and final event of the year was a big success and our best of the year.

In the three vendor markets we attended, and our four months in business, 2022 taught us so much and helped us get our start.

Ivyco Design Home Decor is our dream coming true. We specialize in home decor, with some refurnished furniture. We strive to sell quality home decor that is unique to the small business world and not like everything you find at the big brand stores. Our products come from small wholesalers, are thrifted, or are handmade by us and our family.

As of right now, you can shop Ivyco online at https://ivyco-design.square.site/, on Instagram @ivycodesign, or at local pop up events. We always make sure to post about our pop up events on Instagram.

For 2023, our goal is set up shop in some small locations like vendor booths and other boutiques as well as continue to be a part of some larger vendor pop ups.

Make sure to follow us on Instagram to stay updated!

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

With any business, there are going to be costs to start. Our goal was to keep our start up costs as low as possible. We mainly used our personal funds to put towards our business. We were also able to sell some furniture and home decor items that we already owned on Facebook marketplace. This helped pay for some of the start up costs. After that, it was just a matter of making sales. Since we didn’t have a brick and mortar store, pop up markets were essential to our business. It was also important to make profit on our products, and so for us, that meant thrifting, up cycling, and being very picky about what we bought. We had to be sure it was going to sell, and that it didn’t cost us too much, since we didn’t want our prices to be too high.

If we didn’t have the capital up front, then we would have had to wait, and save extra money each month until we did have the capital. Thankfully for us though, we were in a position to go ahead and start our business. We just had to be cautious of how much we were spending on our business versus how much we were bringing in.

It’s also important to know that when starting a business, you probably are not going to be able to pay yourself at first and it may take some time before you are able to do so. It may take some time before your business is profiting more than it is spending. I would say that’s normal.

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

I was just checking our social media the other day, and I saw we were almost at 100 followers. That may not seem like all that many to some people, but for us, that is a big deal! When we first started our business, we had very few followers, so the fact that we have gotten to almost 100 so far is great! I can’t wait to keep growing our following!

It’s not just about the number though! It’s super important to us that our followers are individuals who actually enjoy our content and want to support our small business. Not just random followers. That is the hard part.

To gain real followers, I have looked to my support system. I started out by following friends and family. It’s so great to see them like and comment on your posts. I even had a friend come to one of our vendor pop ups when she saw me post about it on our social media. Things like that just mean so much more than an Instagram like.

I also found it helpful to post about it on my personal social media accounts often. The more I shared about our new business, the more support we received. If one of my personal followers saw it and followed along, that meant that they were most likely going to be a supporter of our business.

Lastly, I have really tried to utilize the power of Instagram and post in the best ways. This means posting regularly, posting reels, and posting about ourselves so everyone can get to know us. I think that if you really try to put yourself out there, it can make a big difference. Also, the Instagram Business account option is really a great way to analyze what posts do best, so that you can make sure to post at the best time, on the best days, and maximize your posts reach.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ivyco-design.square.site/
• Instagram: @ivycodesign
• Facebook: facebook.com/ivycodesigns
• Other: Email: [email protected]