We recently connected with Maria Mengel and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Maria, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.
In a little less than 6 years, we grew a super-niche custom jewelry business from two women working out of a corner in the family room to a team of 6 women, shipping 15,000 custom and hand-crafted orders! In all of this, we’ve all managed to work (mostly) part-time, while also keeping family at the center and heart of *everything*. One thing we’ve learned over time is that when you prioritize your family and when you treat your employees like family, you can build a really solid team. When you’ve got a rock-hard foundation like that, you can accomplish almost anything. When one team member has a baby, has surgery, suffers a miscarriage, has a death in the family, or is caring for sick children at home, we’ve got 5 more teammates standing in the wings waiting to pick up the slack. How could a small business even thrive without this level of support? I don’t think it’s possible!
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.
My business partner, Meghan, and I started this business because we were mothers who wanted a creative outlet that would help provide income for our families, without sacrificing our primary responsibility: our children. Milk + Honey Jewelry is hand-crafted business that creates beautiful and custom keepsake jewelry for mothers using their own breastmilk. Yes, it is what it sounds like! Our customers mail us their breast milk (or other precious keepsakes: lock of hair, cremation ashes, dried flowers, etc), and we use that to create something remarkable and meaningful for them as a tangible reminder of a sacred and intimate season of their lives. I like to say that we’re a perfect mix of an ecommerce and a service-based business. Over the years, we’ve managed to grow a custom jewelry company without sacrificing quality or attention to detail. Every customer and their story is valued, and we let them know it! Many sets of hands and hearts create something beautiful for our customers: preserving their breastmilk and crushing into a powder by hand, creating their metal jewelry using tools, jewelry components, and solder, hand-mixing the breast milk with resin to create gorgeous stones and designs, writing a personalized thank you card for every single customer, and being available for every customer service need.
How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?
When we preserve a customer’s breastmilk, we label and store it safely at our jewelry studio. We have almost 15,000 preserved batches of breastmilk saved now! A few times per year, we offer our past customers a special Customer Loyalty deep discount, just for them, using their stored breastmilk. We consider it a true honor that we have customers who come back time after time, to purchase more keepsake jewelry. We are always amazed to see that some customers come back to us for every major life event: Sending their wedding flowers to preserve into a necklace, then their breastmilk from their first baby to make a ring, then the cremation ashes of a special family member who has passed away for another necklace, and then another batch of breastmilk and lock of hair after baby #2 comes along for a bracelet or earrings. The significance of earning someone’s trust to be invited to be a part of the story for all of these sacred and important moments of their life is not lost on us. We’re very blessed.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
SHEW–2020 was a constant near death moment. We opened our business in 2018 and were slowly but consistently growing. My business partner and I were both due with a baby in 2020. Mine was born first, on the morning of the COVID pandemic shutdown. We had just hired a new (second) employee to be able to help us as we grew. She couldn’t come to work, as she was not an “essential” worker. Meghan then suffered some pretty serious health complications in pregnancy, was hospitalized and going through surgeries in her pregnancy. It was at this exact time that online shopping habits went through the roof and Milk + Honey grew 679% that year. We had hundreds of pending orders and customers to deal with, I was recovering from childbirth, Meghan was hospitalized, and none of our employees could come to work. We were in over our heads, for sure. With many late night work sessions, we survived. Our general manager at the time was picking up nearly all the slack while working from home. I stayed up virtually all night every night, alternating between answering customer service emails, nursing a brand new baby, processing orders, and nursing a new baby again every hour or so. Meghan painfully created jewelry while she could barely even sit up straight while 9 months pregnant and changing the dressing on her surgical wounds. Meanwhile, the world felt like it was crumbling apart, everyone was afraid for their health and safety, there was political turmoil, and all of our regular vendors and manufacturers were dealing with extreme supply chain and shipping issues. It was the most stressful time of my life, but I look back on that season knowing that if we could make it through that, we can make it through anything.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.milkandhoney.jewelry
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milkandhoneybreastmilkjewelry/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/milkandhoneyjewelry
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGk_-C4dKLYqCKV6VJIAXfw
- Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/milkandhoneyjewelry
Image Credits
Liz Hough Olivia Sens