We recently connected with Misty Peterson and have shared our conversation below.
Misty, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How do you feel about asking friends and family to support your business? What’s appropriate, what’s not? Where do you draw the line?
Asking friends and family to help support and promote our business has been essential. Without them we wouldn’t be where are now. It is NOT easy getting your name out there in the beginning for sure. 90% of our customers are friends, family and from word of mouth. Some of our biggest bulk orders are from friends giving out our card and referring us.
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 moved to Utah 2 years ago as my husband was station here at Hill Air Force Base. I had to quit my job when we moved and was lost on what to do. My kids are young, so I decided to try out this stay-at-home mom thing. Well, my neighbor Meghan also decided to stop working to stay at home with her kids too. Meghan taught me how to use my Cricut for more than just scrapbooking. After that we both started making shirts and tumblers. I then ended up talking Meghan into starting a side business in hopes that we could both help financially at home. We have been doing this now for 1.5 years. What sets us aside apart from all other t-shirt and tumbler makers is we do so much custom work. Someone will message or call us asking for shirts made with very specific requests. we love bringing their requests to life! Meghan makes wreaths too for all custom requests. Football season we get a lot of wreath requests for their favorite team. Right now, we are doing a lot of sports team’s shirts, work shirts for companies, and matching vacation shirts.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
We created a page on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and created an Etsy page. Facebook is really the only social media platform that I truly understand. It has been a challenge remembering to post our products on the other platforms especially when I am not on those platforms to often. My advice is to not lose faith. Someone is looking at your stuff and just one day people will place orders. It is exciting when you see the order come in and it’s a complete stranger. To me whatever we are doing is working. It may be slow and hard but nothing good comes easy!
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Funding has been a little tricky. We both used a lot of personal capital to start out. Any money we made in the first year went right back into paying for more materials. This is hard especially when you only have one person working in your household and the other one is spending more than you’re making. There were many times Meghan and I thought this is not worth it. Finally, it is starting to payoff. We are just now starting to make a profit.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @MOUNTAINGIRLSBOUTIQUE7
- Facebook: https://fb.me/MNTGIRLSBOUTIQUE