We recently connected with Lisa Wiley and have shared our conversation below.

Lisa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Lisa, appreciate you joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

Well, besides starting my business, which I think is the biggest risk of all, we recently purchased our own warehouse and manufacturing facility!

When I first started my business, I had moved back home to live with my mom, and she graciously let me use her basement for the first five years while I got my company up and running. Once I was solidly on my feet, I built my own home and moved my business into a 1,900 sq ft warehouse space that I was renting. That space worked fine until the last few years, where we couldn’t squeeze anything more into the space.

We had been looking at purchasing a building for several years, but inventory was low, and we just couldn’t find anything. We ended up renting an additional unit in our complex, so now we had 3,800 sq ft. Still, it wasn’t ideal being in 2 separate units, so we kept looking for something to purchase.

I came across a gem of a property this past February and put in an offer right away. After some negotiation, we settled on a price, and we just moved in last week! The building is way more space than we need at 14,500 sq ft, but we plan to rent out half of it and also set up a small boutique to help cover some of the costs of the mortgage.

It was a really scary time to buy a building, with interest rates rising drastically lately, and talk of a pending recession on the horizon. But I believe in our product and my team, and our business was being hindered by the lack of space we had in the previous location. Time will tell if it was a good investment, but with real estate, I feel like you can’t go wrong in the long run. Sometimes you just have to trust your gut with the biggest risks and go for it!

Lisa, 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?

I started my company back in 2008, after being laid off from my job as a bedding designer. I had taken a screen printing class in college, so I knew the basics, and etsy was just becoming a pretty big website at that point. I thought I would make some tee shirts and see if I could sell them on etsy. I gave myself 6 months to get the company going, and if I couldn’t make any money by then, I was going to look for another “real” job.

I youtubed what I didn’t know, and just sort of figured things out as I went. I sold my first shirt on etsy in 4 days, and had sold 16 in the first month! The next month, I took the shirts to a craft show and did $6,000 in sales and I thought, “I might be onto something here!”

That was 15 years ago, and the business has gone through many changes over the years. We no longer make shirts, and I am no longer the one doing the screen printing. I have a team of 5 full time and 7 part time gals, and we are primarily a manufacturer of funny gift items.

We make funny kitchen towels, zipper pouches, onesies, sticky notes, notebooks, list pads, stickers, candles, Swedish dishcloths, wine glasses and coasters.

We love being able to provide affordable, clever gifts that make our customers laugh.

I’m most proud of the fun work environment I’ve created. We are constantly laughing and joking, and having a fun time while we’re working. We bring our dogs to work, eat lunch together everyday, and are constantly going on fun field trips to animal shelters, the movies, or restaurants.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Like most businesses, we had to Pivot so hard during Covid. We sell our products mostly to boutiques, and many of them were closed during the first several months of Covid. Even when the stores did reopen, they weren’t interested in buying towels.

We started screen printing funny face masks, and making Covid coloring books. We even designed our own line of funny hand sanitizer bottles and got them manufacture in China.

2020 was such a hard year. We worked our butts off figuring out how to manufacture new products, and our profit margin was cut in half. But I kept all of my employees working, and we made it through to the other side. I know many other businesses weren’t as lucky as we were, and I’m so grateful that we made it through.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We manufacture about half of our products in house, and the rest we have other various manufacturers create for us.

For the kitchen towels that we screen print, we started off with just the basics. My dad set a piece of plywood on our pool table in the basement that I used as my printing table. he cut another piece of wood that he attached hinges to, and that’s what I would use to attach my screens to for printing. We figured out the whole set up just by watching YouTube videos.

Now we are working with a 4 color screen printing press. I had no clue how to use a. press like that, but I found a screen printing trade show that I attended and there were tons of different vendors there with presses set up, giving demonstrations to people and answering questions. I bought our press and a conveyor dryer after attending that show, and it completely changed my business.

Before the press, one person could print around 200 towels per day. Now, one person can print around 1,200 towels per day!

We have always just ‘decorated’ ‘blanks’, we have never actually sewn any of the products we are printing. We will order samples from various companies until we find the item we like best. Then we start ordering in bulk to get the best deal.

For our products that we get manufactured for us, many of those manufacturers we have found on Alibaba. When we are tying to get a new product made, for example sticky notes, i will go on Alibaba and type in ‘custom sticky notes’. I’ll find a handful of vendor that look like they might be able to produce what we are looking for. Then I’ll send an email to each of them asking their cost, lead time, minimums, etc. I’ll pay around $50 to have each of them send me a sample of other sticky notes they’ve made in the past.

Then, depending on which sample I like best, and who communicated best with me and answered my questions, we will pick one manufacturer to work with. It can be scary working with someone you’ve never met before from a different country, but so far we’ve had nothing but good experiences.

My biggest tip when manufacturing a product, is to be sure you can produce somehting at the right price so that you can sell it wholesale and still have a big enough profit left to run your company. I see so many compaines trying to sell products so cheaply that it just isn’t sustainable.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ellembeegift.com
• Instagram: @ellembeegift
• Facebook: @ellembeegift