We were lucky to catch up with Meghan Davis recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Meghan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

My small boutique is completely family owned and operated. My mom and I are co-owners, the main employees, the buyers, and more. My father also plays a role through his talents in making all of our brick & mortar racks, displays, etc. So, my thoughts on family business personally are that I couldn’t do it without them in more ways than one, but it is very hard to separate the roles sometimes. It’s a unique & comforting support system having them as my backbone, but when all the stress and responsibility associated with small business ownership is spread between us all, it is sometimes are to take a step back and have the separation of business and family.

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 boutique has sort of a unique conception. I minored in Business in College, and a large portion of a certain class was dedicated to conceptualizing a business idea. Our final for the class was essentially acting as a contestant on Shark Tank, my classmates and I pitching ideas and business plans to our professor and a panel of others. My idea was Cooper & Bailey’s (my current small business), an online boutique whose niche was to mend the gap in in a variety of ways within women’s shopping destinations. The goal was to create a store that offered a blend of trendy, inexpensive items with high-quality capsule wardrobe pieces, that were suitable to a range of ages. Upon graduating from college, my mom (who worked full-time & still does elsewhere) and I decided to run with the idea and make the class business plan come to fruition. They encouraged me to start small, low risk, move back to my beloved hometown, and start there. We started the boutique online, and quickly realized the importance to customers to touch & feel fabrics, be able to try things on, and most importantly, converse. We opened our brick & mortar store in its first location with the same start small, low risk mentality, but quickly transferred to a different location in the Historic Pinehurst, NC Village. Having been born & raised in this community, I feel extremely blessed to be able to house my dream in such a special place. We’ve always maintained our niche in curating trendy clothing & accessories at a lower price point, with high quality, higher end items to last multiple seasons for all ages. That’s one of the things that has been great owning the store with my mom, we can showcase the same look on two different ages, making options work for a range based on how you style them.

We’ve also honed in on a unique opportunity in our location of Pinehurst, NC, being a historic, famed golf resort town. We started creating Pinehurst, NC merchandise, designed in-house & produced locally, for the tourists and locals alike. It’s a fun way to express my small town pride, as well as something special for the store that sets us apart.

But I think the most full-circle lesson I’ve learned from that class, and that professor, was that in any business, people invest in people. And that’s been our main focus and passion since opening the store, and something I think that has created and maintained our clientele. Customers have become akin to family and friends and that’s what it’s all about for us.

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

I believe owning a small business during Covid illustrates our resiliency the best. It was so unexpected, and there’s certainly not a manual to consult for small business ownership in the first place, so what were you to do? We had a business that relied 80% on in-person traffic that was abandoned at once without warning. Simultaneously I was coming up on the end of a lease and tormented with uncertainty of the future. We shifted the focus to online sales, free local delivery, different offerings through social media, and more. My family was so supportive through it all, and after much prayer and keeping the faith we survived the uncertain season and finished it with a move into a new space within the Village. In some was the circumstances around Covid in regards to business, were blessings in disguise.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

I found this question interesting because I feel that small business ownership is constant fire drills ;) We have been fortunate in having no dramatic mishaps for the business, but rather a series of learning curves in mistakes that shouldn’t be made. I’ll share the most recent, which is only somewhat funny considering the players involved! As I mentioned previously my mom and I are the two main employees, and sometimes our communication gets off a little bit. We hosted an event at the store, it was quite busy, so some of the normal details were skipped over for the sake of time, ie: writing notes on things as reminders, taking merchandise off of online inventory. I sold a blouse to a fellow boutique owner, and placed it in our back room where I was to steam it and deliver to her the following day. Well on the following day, because I did not have time to place a note on it, my mom was working and believed the blouse to be fair game….and sold it to another customer. Nightmare right! Now as I mentioned the story is funny only because of the players involved, the second purchaser of the blouse happened to also be a friend. After I realized what had happened, all was communicated and understood…and the ‘fire’ was put out. Lesson learned in always making the time to note things when you won’t be there the next day!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cooperandbaileys.com
• Instagram: @cooperandbaileys

Image Credits
Cara Ann Mathis: Catcher In The Rye Photography (only for my initial solo shot)