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

Alright, Nicole thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job

Before becoming a freelance journalist and business owner, I spent almost a decade as a middle school language arts teacher. In fact, I have three education degrees, a few certifications, and countless hours of teacher leadership under my belt. But something about the profession never seemed right. I was good at my job…really good at it, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t as fulfilling as I wanted it to be, nor did it provide the flexibility I wanted in a day-to-day schedule.

One of the benefits of teaching, and particularly teaching writing, is that I learned how to be an excellent (in my humble opinion), email communicator. One of the tricks of the education trade is to write an email as a “positive sandwich.” Start with something kind, state the problem, and end with something kind. It was how I was taught to deliver not-so-great news to parents, but today, it helps me communicate with customers and editors alike.

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?

One of the things I am most proud of with the career I have today is that I literally created it out of thin air. As cheesy as it sounds, there is only one me. When I decided to leave teaching to pursue writing, I knew I would need experience and clips. I took an internship as a 30-year-old with a local sustainable shoe brand. I would teach middle school all day then drive to midtown Atlanta to the basement of an office building to work on fashion marketing emails, blogs, and social media. The company was a little ahead of the D2C businesses that are so much a part of our world today, so it ultimately didn’t make it, but it gave me the experience I needed to change paths. Doing social media management and blogging lead to writing which lead to editorial contacts which lead to getting to write for huge publications like Southern Living.

When pandemic shutdowns brought most freelance work back in-house, I turned my antiquing hobby into a full-fledged gig. I sourced antiques, showcased them on Instagram, and started shipping them all over the country. Grandmillennial Shop, my then side business, is now what allows me the creative freedom to pursue stories I want to pursue while saying no to the ones I don’t.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media can be such a mind game. Who likes me? Who doesn’t? Why doesn’t someone like me? Why isn’t this product selling? What’s a reel? Should I be on tiktok? Is it too late to be on tiktok? As if we, as business owners, didn’t have enough to worry about! When I started to grow Grandmillennial Shop’s following, I took the approach of a rising tide lifts all boats. I shared businesses just like mine and encouraged my shoppers to shop with those brands too. I became friends with my competitors and started to see them as peers instead of enemies. It was the single best way to grow. They put me in front of their audience, and I put them in front of mine.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

I use Shopify for Grandmillennial Shop, and I love it. It makes shipping a breeze, and it’s easy to add new products directly from my phone. It honestly has so many features, I am not sure I’m even aware of them all!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://grandmillennialshop.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grandmillennialshop/
• Other: https://muckrack.com/nicole-letts