Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Liz Downey. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Liz, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

Naming our business was actually one of the easier things we did, and as a designer with many clients in the past, I know how hard it can be. My graphic design business was named Tumbleweed Design, because I related to the idea of being somewhat untethered or unencumbered in life and creativity. So when my sister, Sarah, and I decided to work together she had a lightbulb moment and said, now we’re “Two Tumbleweeds”. And it just made perfect sense. We had both moved around a fair amount and felt connected to the idea of randomness in our new business, especially since our first product was a set of dice. (Foodie Dice)

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.

Two Tumbleweeds started with the launch of Foodie Dice on Kickstarter in 2013. At the time I was working as a freelance graphic designer, but my sister and I wanted to work together. We had the idea for the dice because we had both been cooking the same things over and over again. We never expected the success that we had when we launched and raised $156,000 in 30 days. People were super excited about solving the age old question, “What’s for Dinner?”.

From there, we added Mixology Dice and the Hatch Notebook which was based on our process for creating the first 2 products, and then the “What’s for Dinner” Notepad which led us to making a line of notepads that help people be more productive and organized.

To be honest, we’ve never really followed a straight path in deciding what to create, and because of that we’ve struggled a bit with defining who we are as a brand. (This may also have something to do with our very different personalities!) More recently we;ve settled onto a more defined path with our unified line of dice (which now include Art and Writing), all of which promote creativity in some area.

We get excited when we see the spark of joy that people get when they roll the dice and have a new idea for what to create. And we love that the act of creation promotes connection, fun, and ultimately finding some kind of flow. We’re looking forward to creating more products with these goals in mind.

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

When we ran our Kickstarter campaign, we thought we were going to pre-sell a few hundred sets and make them in our garage. We ended up selling over 6,000 sets, and we had to very quickly figure out how we were going to make them. We had to find a different engraving partner and source extra materials. We ended up using 2 different engravers and the quality wasn’t the same. We had to sort through thousands of dice and cotton pouches to quality check them and still managed to deliver everything before Christmas as promised. It was stressful and took a lot of time, but we were proud that we stuck to our deadline and made all of our backers happy.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We sell on our own website, Etsy, and Amazon. When we started on Amazon in 2015, it was because they invited us into their “Handmade” category. We were hesitant, but we tried it and the sales quickly outpaced Etsy. Though we still love and prefer the customers on Etsy, Amazon is a larger source of revenue. It comes with many challenges (like people copying our original products) that seem to keep increasing, and we’ve been working to diversify and build our customer base in other places. We enjoy having a more direct connection to our customers, and that’s a challenge on Amazon. If we did it all over again, we might choose to only sell on our website and Etsy so that we’d have a larger customer base, but it’s hard to know if that would have been more successful. Amazon fulfillment definitely makes it easier to get things to customers more quickly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.twotumbleweeds.co
• Instagram: @twotumbleweeds
• Linkedin: liz-downey-07749710

Image Credits

na