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

Hi Nora, thanks for joining us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

I find this work and succeeding in this goal, incredibly fulfilling — and I can be my own boss and make time for my family, too. As a female business owner, this means that I get to run an organization along the values I define. It affords me financial independence and autonomy, which is something that all women should have. Most of all, it means that I can inspire and motivate other women to take on the challenge and run their own business. This gives me a purpose to wake up everyday and continue rising above the challenges.

Nora, 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?

I started my career in Investment Banking in NYC because I wanted the financial independence that generations of women in my family never had. When I received my first promotion, I wanted to revamp my wardrobe to reflect my new position but I couldn’t find any styles that met my needs; everything I found was either still too expensive for me, too sexy, too cheap or too dowdy. The fact that I could not dress this way was frustrating; so I began to have my own clothes custom made. Soon my colleagues asked where they could buy my clothes and after being asked enough times, I decided to launch my own label. The rest is history.

I ultimately made the decision to leave my Wall Street career to help women feel confident at work so that they can achieve their goals and reach financial independence. The seemingly unchanging reality is that professional women are judged for how they look and what they wear to work. Over the years, we’ve seen how women’s representation in the workplace has increased, yet there is still a small amount of women that hold executive-level positions. With my business, I hope to continue helping these women thrive in the corporate world.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Prior to COVID, our revenues had reached $1 million in sales; however, due to COVID, we were forced to close our stores and our revenues drastically dropped and we almost lost all hope. During COVID, we took a leap of faith and transitioned from a brick and mortar-based business to an e-commerce business. This decreased the overall volume of our business in the short-term but in the long-term, this strategy is more scalable. But, as we have learned, necessity is the mother of innovation! During this pivot, we spent time perfecting a new website that focused on predicting styles that our customers would like, built complete looks for them, and worked one-on-one with clients via ZOOM to deliver a personalized styling experience. As a team of six so far – all part time – we believe that our website can become a multimillion dollar styling platform.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Building a presence on social media can be hard, but very rewarding. Our target customer (women in their forties-sixties) is not that kind of person that you would expect to spend time on social media. We do our best to adapt our content to our audience, but still paying attention to to current trends which play a huge role on social media. We try to offer engaging content that our customer could actually find useful; we mainly offer styling advice and solution for different dress codes and body types. To anyone kicking off their social media account I would say: share what makes you unique and what can set you apart from your competitors. Social media is saturated with any kind of content, but at the end of the day, people like to see something that is beautiful, entertaining and can add value to their time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://noragardner.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/NoraGardnerNYC/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/noragardnernyc/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nora-gardner/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/NoraGardnerInfo
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/nora-gardner-new-york