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

Alright, Melanie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?

I’ve been running businesses with my spouse for nearly 20 years. We started our first business together while we were dating and quickly pushed forward into many adventures, business and personal! While getting to work with my husband is one of the biggest blessings of my life, it’s also one of the most challenging. We’re both natural leaders who, in our early days and still some today, step on one another’s toes.

We have learned to recognize one another’s strengths and weaknesses. In doing so, we’ve successfully aligned job tasks accordingly and do our best to stay out of one another’s way. One key to our success is trusting our partner with our ‘side of the business.’ In our business, Rustico Tile & Stone, my husband runs manufacturing and logistics while I focus on sales, service, marketing, and finance tasks. When we need help, we come to one another for brainstorming and troubleshooting. However, we’ve also learned to leverage my sales knowledge and product demand/trends to influence our manufacturing and import levels. We’re a well-oiled machine, but that’s mostly because we’ve made every mistake along the way. We’ve learned and improved year after year… rinse and repeat!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an entrepreneur, digital marketer, and customer service specialist for online businesses. My husband and I own and run Rustico Tile & Stone – the largest manufacturer, importer, and distributor of handmade Mexican tile and stone products. We’re an online business based outside Austin, Texas, shipping worldwide. We also operate a real estate investment company and a construction services company. With two teenagers active in school and sports activities, I don’t sit still!

I’m proud to have built an industry-leading company that is almost 20 years old. Owning and operating businesses with my husband has been an exciting (and stressful) adventure. There’s a fine line between being business partners and a married couple! It’s also been a privilege to serve our dedicated employees over the years and develop them for even bigger professional pursuits. And, of course, I’ve built friendships from so many customer relationships worldwide over the years.

But I’m most proud to have grown my family during these years. We have two amazing kids who are genuinely nice, driven people. We plug into our community in various ways to serve others, love, and play hard!

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

I owned an eBay franchise store before I started Rustico Tile & Stone. That business was a failure—a complete failure! But I learned a lot, which helped me develop successful companies. With the skillset I learned through eBay, I found a supplier for Saltillo tile (terracotta tile) and figured out how to successfully sell it on eBay. Very quickly, my sales outpaced my supplier. So, faced with supply chain issues, I did the next best thing – I took a trip to Mexico with my husband. We connected to manufacturers who could fill my sales orders… and a business was born. Within two years of aggressive digital marketing and investment in manufacturing infrastructure, we became the US’s largest producer and supplier of Saltillo tiles. Fast forward nearly 20 years, our product lines have expanded, and we’ve been able to build other businesses as an extension of Rustico’s operations.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

In our consumer culture, it’s believed that ‘the customer is always right.’ But I’ve learned that the opposite is often true. This is one of the most powerful lessons I’ve had to learn and teach my staff how to navigate. While we don’t sell a complicated product (tile or stone), our customer experience is complex. We educate our clients about the artisan nature of our product and consult on topics including how to measure rooms to calculate square footage and how many tiles to order to accommodate for overages, design advice, how to receive and inspect freight shipments, and how to prep and install our products. So, if we do our job correctly, we must know more than our clients to educate them properly. So, in that process, we have gentle conversations to educate our clients – even if they are wrong about specific topics.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rusticotile.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rusticotile/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RusticoTileandStone/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-c-1760612b/
• Twitter: https://x.com/rusticotile
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@rusticotile
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/rustico-tile-and-stone-leander
• Other: https://rusticotile.com/our-blog/