We recently connected with Lindsay Rust and have shared our conversation below.

Lindsay, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Madeleine, Lizzy, and I all met when we attended a high school music festival at Brigham Young University in 2017. A few years later, we met our cellist, Mandy, when we were all college students at BYU pursuing music degrees. We collaborated casually on a few occasions and were recruited to play a few weddings in the area. We had so much fun playing together and decided to formally advertise our quartet in Utah’s wedding and event industry. We felt that our high-quality education and collaboration skills created a professional-level sound that was highly marketable. Thus, “Souvenir Strings” was born. We are thrilled with the growth we have seen over the past three years and look forward to future development.

Lindsay, 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?

Souvenir Strings is unique among string quartets because each of us are full-time professional musicians. Music is not merely our hobby or side-gig, it is our passion and career! Madeleine, Mandy, Lizzy, and I each began our classical music training as children and furthered our education by pursing rigorous bachelor’s of music degrees at Brigham Young University, Utah’s top music school. The sound we create through our collaboration is refined, elegant, and elevated. We are versatile musicians and offer many genres in our performances, including pop, rock, classical, jazz, Broadway, movie hits, and more. We also have the ability to create custom arrangements for our clients’ song requests, which is a high-level musical skill. In additional to our professional-level playing, we pride ourselves on professional communication and conduct.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Early last year, we only had a couple gigs booked and we were feeling discouraged. We knew that we had professional-level entertainment to offer, but didn’t know how to get hired more often. We decided to set a goal of booking 10 more gigs before the end of the year. In order to achieve this goal, we set to work. We attended bridal shows and other events for free to advertise our services, created a website, spent endless hours crafting instagram reels, reached out to venues and event planners, dropped off business cards, and more. At the time, these attempts felt futile because they did not yield immediate results. Now, over a year later, we are heading into peak wedding season with 17 events already booked and more coming. We are so grateful for this growth and excited for what lies ahead. I only wish I could go back and tell myself that it would all be worth it!

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

With no prior knowledge or experience building a brand through social media, it has been a big learning curve for us! Recently, I have found that connecting with other social media accounts is the most effective way to increasing exposure. Tagging other vendors we work with, capturing content of our venues and tagging them, adding locations to our posts, and asking to be added as a collaborator on posts from events we attended have helped strengthen our connections online. I have also made an effort to interact with the posts of other vendors to promote positive relationships and increase exposure.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://souvenirstrings.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/souvenirstrings/