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

Alright, Rachael thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

We are an ECommerce site that sells unique, high-quality components for your porch, deck or outdoor living space. Being a small business, we are able to differentiate ourselves easily from our much larger competitors. One of the main differences is that most often people have to purchase high quality products like ours through a distributor. They have to go to a lumberyard, or find a contractor that has a connection to a lumberyard or is a dealer of a particular brand, etc. The homeowner won’t know what anything costs or how accessible those items are, unless they go through those proper channels. Our website lists all of our products and the prices of each product right there–plain as day. And ANYONE whether you are a custom home builder, architect, designer, or a homeowner with no experience, can add those items to your cart and place an order. There aren’t so many hoops to jump through.
Our other largest differentiator is customer service. Being a small company, there are only a few salespeople here. When you call us, one (or all of us) is very aware of you, your order, what status it is in the manufacturing or shipping process, etc. So in summary, customer service and accessibility I believe are what sets us apart from these other behemoths in our industry.

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

I got into this industry because of my mother, Nancy Moore. She started The Porch Company, a design and construction company in Nashville, TN over 35 years ago. She built the company from nothing to an incredibly reputable and successful business. As an offshoot of that business, she had an idea to start selling some of those unique porch components, to others outside of Nashville. And–that’s where I came in. She asked me to help her start this other venture, and that’s what we did! We started by selling 1 or 2 products, and now 11 plus years later, The Porch Store is a separate LLC that has had growth year after year. We have shipped our products to 45 states, we cut an average of 2,000 sheets of PVC per year to make our railing panels, we use approximately 16,000 board feet of Sapele (wood) per year to make our doors and other products, and we have a whopping 8 employees (in addition to ourselves) that work in either the office or the shop. As you can see we are very much still a small business, but I am so proud of how far we have come and what we have built.
I am incredibly grateful for the leadership of my mom, as well as the partnership of our other business partner, Dakota. The three of us together bring very different things to the table, and that is why I think we will continue to be successful.

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

We sell on our site, which is a WordPress site. We use the WooCommerce plugin. We started off as a Shopify site, which was a great launching pad. We only had a few products at the time, and it was simple for us to make the site ourselves and become an official ECommerce site! We learned quickly, however, that we needed customization that Shopify (at least at that time) couldn’t accommodate. We needed shipping to be set up for freight AND ground, and for those prices to adjust based on these very specific parameters of combinations of products in the cart. So, we were advised to switch to WooCommerce, and hire a professional.
There are pros and cons to everything, of course! The pros of our current set up is that it is incredibly customized and built out to our liking. The cons of that are that it cost us a lot of time and money, and now we have this monster of a website that has to be maintained on a daily basis, by a team of developers. I have to be honest and say that sometimes I long for those simpler days!

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

Currently we manufacture over 80% of our products right here at our shop. Our craftsmen work for us full-time, and we have so much more quality control and shorter lead times than we ever have. Previously, we made a few items in-house, and the rest we farmed out to various manufacturers. It was incredibly difficult to control the quality of the product going out, keep our customers up to date with accurate information regarding their order and their ship dates, etc. Although making the change to more in-house manufacturing required us to purchase very expensive equipment (yes, even a large CNC machine / robot that we named Simon), a larger more organized warehouse, more staff, etc, I absolutely believe bringing the manufacturing in house is one of the reasons we have such happy customers! I will say my business partner Dakota is 100% the reason our manufacturing runs so smoothly. He runs that shop like a well-oiled machine. It’s so important to partner with the right people!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.porchstore.com
• Instagram: @porch.store
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Porch.Store/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachael-bornhop-1522a425/

Image Credits
J. Paul Moore Photo