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

Nicole, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

I get asked this question a lot because I do have a lot of my family that works for Sew Sweet Minky Designs. I love working with family! When I work with family, it is easier for me to set and hold proper expectations because I already have a relationship with them. With that comes that I also already know how to talk with them and have productive conversations. I also feel that I can be more direct with them. I treat everybody that works for us with respect and always will. But sometimes it can be hard to be as direct with an employee as you need to be. With family, I have never had to worry about this. I believe that part of the reasoning is that I’m not worried about hurting their feelings. My last reason for loving to work with family is that I already trust them. That foundation has already been built and so we can get working on what matters faster.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started Sew Sweet Minky Designs out of my home about 9 years ago. I wasn’t really trying to build a business at first. I just wanted to create items to build my self esteem, give me something to do along with raising my kids, and to make a little extra money on the side for our young and growing family. Unknowingly, I chose one of the hardest fabrics to sew with, Minky, and taught myself how to sew blankets and other baby items without any templates. I saw FaceBook indoor yard sale groups as good place to advertise and sell the projects that I was making. From there I expanded into Etsy and sold on that platform for about a year. One night while scrolling through social media, I saw the Facebook Live feature and started learning what that was all about. After weeks of watching some direct sales companies selling product on FaceBook Live. I started to figure out how I could sell our product on this platform and leave all other platforms behind. I did a test run to see how this would work with older inventory that hadn’t sold yet and was well pleased. From that moment, I stopped taking orders and started making the blanket inventory that I wanted and kept selling on FaceBook Live. Starting out, we sewed only baby blankets but now make blankets in all sizes.

Since officially becoming a business in 2016, we have kept the model of having all of our blankets made locally. We have about 150 seamstresses who all sew from home on their own time who make all of our product. We take quality control very seriously because we want our customers to love their product, and for the items to last a lifetime. Every item that we make is check by two people that we call quality control specialists. They use a metal wand to check for pins, which we put a rule in place that all of our seamstresses are to use gator clips to hold fabric in place while sewing instead of pins. They check that the blanket is square, that the seam tension is good and won’t pop, and they check for flaws in the fabric.

We love our customers and know that we wouldn’t have a business without them. Because of this, we want all of our customers to have a great experience and to love whatever they purchase from us.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Starting out, I took $60 from our family budget to buy fabric to make my first 3 blankets. From those sales, I put every penny back in to purchasing more fabric. I kept this model going for about the first year to build capital so that I could purchase more and more fabric for more blankets. Once demand for blankets grew, I wanted to start placing wholesale orders and save money on fabric. I took a loan from my brother for my first wholesale order and paid that loan back within a couple of months. I don’t think I paid myself any money for the first two years.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

Right after I started out hiring other seamstresses to help sew blankets, I found myself in a position where I wasn’t making enough money to make my weekly payroll. Part of this was because I wasn’t charging enough money to take into account paying those seamstresses. I had a decision to make, start charging more for my blankets or go back to making them all on my own again and stunt the growth and demand that I had. I called my husband one day who was out of state for work and told him that I couldn’t make payroll and that I didn’t know what to do. I knew that we didn’t have personal money to cover the whole amount but was hoping that we could pull from what little savings we had or put it on a credit card if we had the room. Apparently my husband had just earned a bonus at work that would cover the whole amount of payroll! After telling him my plan to charge more and how I would make that money back for our family, he agreed to give me the money to make payroll! I learned a lot from this experience that has helped me to keep Sew Sweet Mink Designs in a safe place financially.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sewsweetminkydesigns.com
• Instagram: @sewsweetminkydesigns
• Facebook: Sew Sweet Minky Designs
• Youtube: Sew Sweet Minky Designs
• Other: Amazon: Sew Sweet Minky Designs