We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Melissa McKenzie a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Melissa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I’m actually one of the co-owners of Carbon and Clay Design Co. When my friend Sandra and I started Carbon & Clay, we really wanted to create a way for more entrepreneurs to get their hands on a strategic website without having to invest 10k before they were ready. Most online businesses evolve and change within the first few years. During that time many things are being tested and tweaked. We’ve seen so many entrepreneurs spend thousands on a really well designed website and then have to turn right back around in 2-5 years to get it redone due to their business shifting.

That’s where Sandra and I came together and boiled down the strategy we used on all our custom website clients into DIY templates so that strategic websites could be affordable to every entrepreneur. Our website templates don’t offer just a pretty site like most website templates out there. We want our template purchasers to be able to have a great looking site that has a strategy behind it so that they can have a great working website from the start – without spending thousands.

Melissa , 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 are Carbon and Clay Design Co, a Squarespace Website Template Shop and Design Studio.

We started as two website designers in the same online industry who later turned into business partners and best friends. We are moms to 7 young children between the two of us.

We don’t just create “pretty” websites. We create Squarespace websites that become your best salesman… selling even while you sleep. And better yet, we’ve created a way for business owners to have access to a strategic and custom looking website – that earns leads and sales – no matter your budget!

All our templates come with a course that teaches the strategy behind websites and marketing so that business owners don’t have to hustle as much looking for their next client.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

It’s kind of an ironic story. We were both website designers in the same online industry working with the same ideal clients. We would be what some people call competitors. We both knew of each other from mutual friends. We both got so busy with clients that we ended up hiring each other out to help with the workload. We found that we both had very different strengths that made us work really well together. After doing multiple client websites together, we started the conversation of what it would look like to open a website template shop together. We ended up doing a beta launch of a branding course we created together at the end of 2019 and after it did really well, Carbon & Clay was born. From then on we did all our client work together. We have since then worked together to create a website template shop and have been working more and more towards a passive income business model together.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Honestly, our own website is our biggest asset. We both know design and website strategy so well that we really worked hard in the beginning to set ours up right from the start. Just 3 years later, we regularly have inquiries in our inbox from potential clients who have found us organically on Google. We frequently make sales on our website and we daily add organic email subscribers to our email list due to setting up our website correctly. Without our website, we would be hustling to show up on social media all day every day. But with being moms to young kids, we knew we wanted to set up a website that was our best salesman for us. It has a lot to do with knowing what to put on each page and where to put it. We have done lots of testing throughout the years and know what works best. This is what we help all of our customers do with our website templates too.

Contact Info:

• Website: carbonandclay.co
• Instagram: instagram.com/carbonandclay

Image Credits
Lauren Elizabeth Photography