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

Lauren, 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?

I’ve been fortunate to find my people along the way. I am surrounded by hundreds of family members and friends that know the person that I am and how far I’ve come. When I created GrownAtHomeDesign, my immediate family and friends were right there to encourage me and support my ideas as they’ve evolved. Find your people! Weed out the negative and your support system will be a driving force. Find those sounding boards in others to bat your ideas back and forth with that ENCOURAGE. Support systems come in all forms: family, neighbors, coworkers, friends from all aspects of your life. The sky is the limit but build your network. If someone finds negativity in your ideas and goals THEY ARE NOT YOUR PEOPLE. If you want to grow, you need the good.

Lauren, 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?

As a young girl, I always knew that I wanted to have my own business. Dreams and doodles and lists on pages, filled my notebooks as I grew up, raised a family and will always be a part of running a business for me. Pen and paper, there’s nothing better together those ideas organized. GrownAtHomeDesign, is actually my third act! For years, when my kids were very little, I ran a little interior painting business. I loved every aspect of it. On days when I didn’t have to work for a client, I would be home and found myself writing online content for different websites which was also a nice gig while raising young ones. Next, I had a friend approach me wondering if, on my days home I would watch her little one. That moment in time turned into 13 years of watching kids all the while raising my own. I built a wonderful little business, helped countless families with working moms that needed that reliable support and it felt amazing. That all came to an abrupt stop with my cancer diagnosis in June of 2021, As I was fighting cancer, I was also mourning the loss of what I had created. I still am. My energy level is different now, I have developed insomnia (super fun) and knew I had to switch gears and create something different with my “new normal”. I picked up and began rolling with GrownAtHomeDesign. Interestingly, I had actually come up with this business idea, logo and name back in 1997 but I was a mama first and this type of business is very time consuming. I look back and think its amazing that the cancer actually reconnected me with a dream of mind that had been sitting on the back burner for 25 years! The idea behind GrownAtHomeDesign was to create handmade items that would inspire and make people feel good when they looked at each piece displayed in their home. Simple, sweet items that made you smile. So during cancer surgery, recovery and treatment, I’ve now spent hundreds of hours playing around with ideas and creating pieces that my customers have loved. It actually helped me heal in more ways than I could have ever imagined. With the help of the nicest most loving man on the planet, my sweet Fiancé, Rich, Ive been able to spend this time growing something new to be proud of and work hard at. We’ve been to many vendor shows and have hosted shopping events. I’m learning how to use various social media outlets to grow my business which has actually been the hardest part for me. I’ve spent hours making videos and social media posts everywhere that I can as I learn what works and what doesn’t with social media as a small business! What I am excited for is learning how to incorporate how I’ve come to live and understand life and what I can focus on creating that will pass along my life lessons and inspire others with my work. I feel like I’m on the right track! I created so many beautiful pieces and inspirational products and have even played around with creating on websites such as Society6, Zazzle and Etsy. My Linktree alone felt like a work of art as I added more and more to it over the last year!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

As a 47 year old, many people are shocked when they hear my entire story. Ive always been an open and honest person, never shying away from talking about the tough topics such as loss, domestic abuse, cancer. Its all been a part of who I am for as long as I can remember. Every moment of life shapes who we are becoming and how we make decisions and see ourselves. Successes and failures are directly related to how we see ourselves and maneuver through the world. I was fortunate enough to survive and thrive in many ways through abuse and loss from a young age because I had grandparents that lived by example that helped raise me and who I emulate in most of how I’ve lived my life. Work hard, be good people, don’t cause harm in the world, love one another, all of those lessons were ingrained in me by their example. So life has sort of felt like a tug of war because, while I am all of that an more, some of that didn’t equip me for handling the hard moments where others popped in and out of my life, caused damage that shaped me as well and left me with self doubt, chipping away at confidence and giving me a sense of clawing my way back to the path I know that I want to be on. Along the way, Ive had a ton of successes while I unravel some of that. When I look back, every hard hit from life, eventually taught me that the path that I was on was the correct one. I’ve healed and embraced all of the bad along the way because I grew the most from all of it. I raised my amazing kids to be well equipped adults, learning so many of my lessons as along the way. Life is good even through the dark times I always say. As I got to a place a few years ago, with adult children to be incredibly proud of, I was hit with a shocking cancer diagnosis. It was a difficult day, however, a day we look back on with pride. I took one look at a doctor in an ER saying that it was officially a cancer diagnoses (after hours of tears and anxiety) and said “Ok, let’s fight.” The greatest part of that fight was how I handled it. I attacked cancer head of with strength and positivity. I’ve always said, “head down, work hard”. I am incredibly proud that the person that I was in that defining moment rose to the challenge in a positive way.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Life just seems to want to hand me lessons on the daily and sometimes I think, can I just get a day off? I joke, but because I am an abuse survivor, one thing that I continue to strive to “unlearn” is what people say or think about you should effect you. For so long, whether I believed it or not, a persons negative words about me would stick with me and consume so much of my thoughts and confidence. Those are the walls that go up in your mind and prevent you from being productive and staying focused. As I grow my business and start anew, I remind myself to leave all of that behind. I say to myself, “Look at what you accomplished in your life so far” or “give yourself a little credit”. I need to ease up on myself as I work hard and remind myself to be proud of what you’ve already accomplished all through life throwing bricks at you, if you will.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/GrownAtHomeDesign
• Instagram: GrownAtHomeDesign
• Facebook: GrownAtHomeDesign
• Linkedin: N/A
• Twitter: N/A
• Youtube: N/A
• Yelp: N/A
• Other: Etsy- GrownAtHomeDesignCo TikTok-GrownAtHomeDesign

Image Credits
Max Haller-Air Max Visuals