We recently connected with Mary Brenneman and Lauren Davis and have shared our conversation below.
Mary and Lauren, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
The year was 2020. May of 2020 to be exact, and as you know that’s the year the world shut down. It was my (Lauren’s) youngest daughter’s 1st birthday, and I was trying to figure out how to make the birthday special even though it was a going to be much different than I had dreamed up in my head just a few months prior. I borrowed some thin cardboard letters from a friend that spelled out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” and stuck them in the yard. As I was outside putting them in the ground, my friend and neighbor, Mary, walked by and commented on them. “I’ve always thought it would be fun to own a yard sign company!” To which I responded “Oh my, me too! I’ve thought it would be such a fun job.” Half jokingly, Mary responded “Let’s start one together!!”
A few nights later, as we stood in the driveway and watched our kids ride bikes and play outside, we brought up the idea again. “Maybe we could start our own yard sign company! There’s nothing like that in our area, and we could easily go set up a sign in someone’s yard! It would be the perfect “job” while we are staying home with our kids.”
A few driveway meetings later, YardFetti was born!! We naively started with five designs… a Dino, cupcake, flamingo, sports cake, and a “welcome home” house. However, we quickly learned that that was not going to nearly be enough options, as our birthday signs were being book out and we were having to turn customers away because we were already booked. It took a lot of trial and error on our part on making sure we used the right material for the signs, how to make the names for the birthday signs, what type of stakes we needed, how we needed to stake the signs, and many other factors, but we eventually found our groove and built YardFetti from the ground up. We eventually went on to trademark our name, and had others reaching out to us to see if we would ever be interested in helping them start their own YardFetti’s in their towns. So we worked with a lawyer and started offering YardFetti Licenses. We now have seven licensees running their own YardFetti across the state of Texas! It’s been amazing to see how God has helped us grow this business much bigger than we originally expected,
Mary and 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?
We offer larger than life celebration yard sign rentals, and holiday door hangers & small holiday yard signs for people to keep! We have so much fun helping others celebrate life’s special occasions. Every sign we offer is original to our brand, and has been specially created by us.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
We started YardFetti with our own personal money, and split everything 50-50. For the first year we did not take a paycheck, and invested all of our profits back into the business so that we could run this debt-free. It was hard to do, but we are so thankful we did this!
Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?
We originally started out with just birthday/celebration rentals. We eventually added in holiday signs and door hangers for customers to purchase to keep!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.yardfetti.com
- Instagram: @yardfetti
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yardfettifw?mibextid=2JQ9oc
Image Credits
Mary Katri