We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rachel Shaffer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rachel below.
Hi Rachel, thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this exact thing. I began experimenting with dyeing during the pandemic shut-down when my company sent all its employees home to work remotely, and I desperately needed a creative outlet that allowed me to still touch and see textiles and colors right in front of me. Come August, I decided to open my business online and take it a step further, but still very much as a side hustle to fulfill something that was missing for me in my newfound work-from-home life.
When things got more serious with my business and I realized it was offering me more than I realized it would, we were at the point of discussing transitioning back into the office. It was a critical moment for me, coming to understand how much I had changed and grown during that time at home, and how what had once fulfilled me in a larger corporate setting no longer did. However, the concept of taking a small business full time was absolutely terrifying.
I mulled over the decision in my mind for MONTHS – and, if I’m being completely honest with myself, those months likely were closer to the year spectrum than I remember. I daydreamed about it, opened up Excel spreadsheets ad nauseum and crunched numbers to see what was realistic. I FaceTimed my financial advisor and told him all the details, emotional and fiscal. I remember calling my parents and telling them about it, but with an overly cautious tone that threw the conversation (to which they matched in their response). I messaged friends who had started businesses, looking for some magic “aha” moment they could share with me. Of course, no one else can tell you when it’s the right time or not – and the idea that it had to be me was utterly nerve-wrecking.
Ultimately, I woke up one morning and it was suddenly time. I don’t think I could have done it earlier, or waited any longer. I noticed, as I began telling people, that they were responding with confidence and enthusiasm because I, too, was sharing the news that way – I was ready. I had done my research, weighed the pros and cons, and made a decision that I felt was an educated one – even if some of that “education” was listening to myself and understanding what I needed outside of basic survival and paying the bills. I honestly think that may have been one of the biggest factors – learning that my work-life balance needed to change, and that fulfillment looked like freedom of creativity and artistic expression to me more than I had realized.
When I quit my full time job, which I had held for nearly a decade, I was surprised to see how much of it translated into what I was doing now with my business. The way you look at customer behavior, on a large scale, is the same way you see how your customers respond to your greens moreso than your yellows. The way I photograph and describe listings on my website is the same way companies hire copywriters and stylists to ensure the most important messages are being communicated across their online platforms. The Excel charts and lists I utilized in a corporate setting for keeping track of day-to-day tasks and production timelines paved the way for me to build my own methods for organizing my workflow, even if it’s on a significantly smaller scale. Skills I developed when speaking to a room of directors gave me the confidence to realize how important it is to tell someone what you think with conviction, even if the thing you’re telling them is “I don’t have an answer right now”. The more I think about it today, the more I think I would not have been ready had I taken the plunge sooner – even if the excitement and the ideas were there. I believe all those elements combined gave me the strength to go for it at the time I did and never look back..
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?
My name is Rachel Shaffer, and I own and operate a small batch dye business called Zeezee Textiles inspired by nostalgia and its emotional connection to color. I specifically dye wool-based yarns for knitting and crocheting, and work out of a home-based studio where I do all of my creating, production, processing and fulfillment myself – it’s a one woman band! I started my business in August of 2020 during the pandemic as a way to stay creative while working from home, and it transformed into a full-time gig in April of 2022 and I’ve never looked back.
I learned to knit when I was 10, and from there it became a bit of a lifelong obsession. The skill ebbed and flowed throughout my life as I got busy with school, but I picked it back up again in college when I was studying fashion design. An internship in NYC with a bridal designer quickly taught me that neither bridal design, nor a big city like New York, was the right fit for me! I sought out a yarn store and some needles as a way to feel a bit closer to home, though I don’t think the decision was an extremely conscious one – something pulled me in that direction of comfort. When I returned to school we had our knitwear course, and suddenly it clicked where I fit into the fashion industry.
I worked for nearly a decade as a knitwear designer for a major American retail brand, and learned an incredible amount about the knitwear industry over those years! As someone who had grown up hand knitting, seeing the industrial side of things was utterly fascinating. I consider myself a bit of an obsessed enthusiast when it comes to hobbies or interests, and so “collecting” skills related to the knitwear world became much of my focus in my spare time – think spinning yarn, combing fiber, learning embroidery, to name a few. Dyeing felt like a natural next step for me, and was something I’d been interested in for a while, but the need for space and extra equipment (even if they were just pots and pans dedicated to the process) was a little intimidating. Being isolated during the pandemic opened up that chance for me to play around a bit with my new-found free time, so those first summer months I played around, watched a ton of YouTube videos, soaked up information, and ultimately created some terribly ugly blunders – but they eventually gave way to some loveliness and it inspired me to open up a shop that August. Most importantly, it fulfilled something in me I didn’t know I needed.
What I am most proud of about my brand is the connection I’ve been able to make with others – I adore storytelling, and find the emotional component of art to be extremely interesting and profoundly strong. We can all experience such a vast variety of things when looking at something beautiful, but the common experience is that we feel emotion. Nostalgia has been a powerful presence in my life and one I find myself drawn to over and over, perhaps because it’s so hard to share with others and that make it poignant and magical – but trying to convey some of those memories through color allows me to connect with someone, even if in a newly created way.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the biggest things I had to unlearn, when I transitioned from working in a corporate retail design setting to running my small business full time, was that productivity and success to not have to look the same at every stage of life, nor should they! My success, output, and pace of work shouldn’t match what a huge corporation can do – but coming from that world after almost 10 years was quite the high-speed bullet train to hop off of. Learning to slow down, put my pen down at the end of the day, and unwind, was extremely difficult.
When I first started my brand, I was still working full time and would work on things in my evenings and weekends – I was very strict with myself about not letting those hours overlap because that didn’t feel right to me. But it meant I was going through some pretty severe burnout – much of which was already there from my existing career. I didn’t know how to hit pause or know when something was finished – and I think a great deal of artists struggle with this: you can always add one more brush stroke, you can always revise a sketch, you can always recolor something and see if that’s the best option. It’s all-consuming. And especially in corporate retail, your world is so large and your competitive sphere is so omnipresent (especially with social media) that there is ALWAYS something to adapt to and build off of.
It took me almost half a year, once I was working for myself full time, to realize it was okay to exercise mid day if I wanted to, or run an errand if it made the most sense to do so after lunch. I could work on writing listings in the evening on the couch, if I didn’t get to it earlier. There was no hard and fast rule that those things had to happen between a set framework of hours, and this freedom was both wonderful… and terrifying. You suddenly realize it’s just between you and yourself that you have to hold yourself accountable, and it was quite an adjustment. I still have days where I sleep a little longer or need to take a break and I just feel – guilty? Like I’m getting away with something that I shouldn’t – but I think in our current “hustle culture”, where we so often see others touting how busy they are and how little time they have for meals, we incorrectly measure of success and worth.
I’m still a work-in-progress in this arena, and perhaps always will be, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that I am the only one who gets to define what it looks like for me to be successful now, and what being productive means. If I’m getting everything done on time, that’s perfect, and if I have time to relax more during certain weeks, that isn’t a reflection of laziness or lack of motivation, but just that week being a little quieter.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
This isn’t going to be the kind of marketing or sales pitch you’re thinking it will be – but I have a feeling it may be one many other business owners can relate to!
I took my business full time in April of 2022, my husband and I got married that July (after 2 years of postponements due to the pandemic), we added a second puppy to our family in August, and by late fall, we were starting to feel …cramped. We owned a three bed, 1 bath ranch style home in a neighborhood just outside of Columbus, Ohio, which was the perfect amount of space for us at the beginning of the year, but Zeezee was starting to show up in nearly every room.
I had my office that housed my laptop, packaging supplies, and inventory, packed into a wooden bookshelf that always ended up spilling over so that yarn had to be stacked and stored in bins on the floor. My personal yarn collection (of course) was in there as well, hanging on the wall. The kitchen was where all of the actual production dyeing took place, at the time on our stovetop (which was replaced earlier in the year when it burst into flames – it definitely wasn’t cut out for that much usage!). But because the kitchen was a common space that we, you know, needed to use for cooking and meals, I had to try and keep all my pans, tongs, measuring containers, and hot water percolator out of the way before and after dye sessions – so these things were painstakingly carried up and down the stairs, to and from the basement, for two years at this point. Everything lived in the back room of our basement, by the laundry, with a rolling cabinet of dyes, a spin dryer for drying the skeins after rinsing, and a hanging IKEA rack that most definitely was intended to be a necktie holder, but was used for hanging drying skeins instead. A huge plastic tupperware took up most of the walking space down there, always full of water or yarn, and frustratingly heavy to move. It was quite the production each day getting everything where it needed to be and back again, and we started to get a little sick of it. As business picked up, our kitchen table additionally got recruited for packaging and shipping, and eventually it felt like there wasn’t a single corner of the house that didn’t have something yarn-related in it! I openly share all this because running a business is a delightful mess – don’t ever let social media tell you otherwise. But at the same time, I felt my set-up was holding me back from future growth, and I felt more amateur than professional.
We started the conversation about moving – my husband is from a small town further north, and we loved the idea of heading somewhere quieter away from the growing city and with a lower cost of living. For the same price we could sell our current home, we could double our space by moving an hour north, and for the first time, I realized the possibility for a dedicated in-home studio was within reach.
However, at this time my husband had recently left HIS job in pursuit of something new, and with uncertainty about what city we’d be landing in, put his job hunt on hold temporarily until we were fully invested in moving back to his hometown. This made us… pretty unappealing to mortage lenders. Who wouldn’t want to loan money to a small business owner with just over 6 months of full-time business, married to someone temporarily out of employment?
In our conversations in the bank, it became pretty clear we were going to have to make our situation look as silver-lined as possible. While I’d been OPEN for over two years, I didn’t have two years of full-time sales to prove stability, and the lenders required this. My husband was actively interviewing with companies in our potential new town, and prospects looked extremely promising. But “extremely promising” doesn’t quite cut it, and I was asked to describe my business to our lender so they could make an evaluation.
In the end, I have no idea if my “pitch” made any difference – my husband had a pending job offer by the time this wrapped up – but I had to pull a myriad of detailed reports from my e-commerce platform and make sure I knew my business vocabulary inside and out. I mapped out yearly projections based on my 7 months of full-time sales, and explained how reliant the independently dyed yarn industry is on repeat customers – so I shared my customer percentages with them. I listed every country I’d ever shipped yarn to, and explained my social media strategy. Was all of that necessary? I’ll never know, but we ultimately got the loan. There was a brief point in time where my husband and I had to sit down and say to each other, quite somberly, that we might just have to wait another year until we had more solidity beneath our feet – another year of dragging pans of water up and down the stairs and sharing a kitchen table with a bunch of yarn labels.
Regardless of what impact was made, it taught me an important lesson that confidence is a pretty wild factor in small business ownership. Whether emailing local yarn shops to see if they’ll carry my products or recommending a color combination to an indecisive customer, (or telling a bank they can have faith in me), I realized I understood my business and my data better than I had realized during that pitch, and could share those details with confidence and conviction. Suddenly, I felt professional.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.zeezeetextiles.com
- Instagram: zeezeetextiles
Image Credits
All photos were taken by myself, Rachel Shaffer