Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Roxy Cruz and Angel Flores. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Roxy / Angel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
We both feel as if the biggest risk we took was the opening of our shop location. There were many risks taken from the day we both decided to simply open up a business. Some of those risks being financially, mentally, life changing and adaptations, to the little knowledge and experience of how a business ran. We both have a full-time job thinking, “We should be good, right?” So without even thinking twice we jumped into the shop hunt. We got blessed and got accepted to open our first business location in San Ysidro. Let us start by saying, ya…we should have thought about it a little more. Because the next thing we knew the process had to move quick, to getting the right licenses to cleaning up the interior of the shop an so on so forth. We struggled financially. Not only where we now on survival mode, we had to push through with whatever finance we had, but we had each others back by helping one another with food and each others mental challenges along the way. We where lucky enough to have friends and family support. I would be lying if we didn’t admit to crying of frustration once in a while, but it was part of the risk we took. As for the life changes, we had to learn how to balance our personal life and business life. Our goal was to leave work at work and focus on friends and family when we could. Of course we still have to put 100% of our effort into everything we did at the shop, but we had to learn to keep our values balanced as well. Together we continue to learn what is needed to keep the business flowing and what are our strengths and weakness to continue to work as a team. On our 6 month we started to feel more at ease, we finally knew what we were doing and how fast to work to continue to thrive as a team. We asked our peers who are business owners many questions along the way and without a doubt or hesitation we got the help and direction needed. We want to thank owners of SewLoka at Barrio Logan and to all our friends for everything they’ve done for us, because without there support, patience, and guidance we wouldn’t know how to continue with our journey. Today we are now celebrating our 1 Year shop opening and we couldn’t feel more proud. Our hard work and risk has been paying off and we wouldn’t want it any other way. We can’t wait to see what the next few years will look like for our future.
Roxy / Angel, 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?
Hello everybody, Our names are Roxy Cruz and Angel Flores.
We are owners of PRINTHINK located in San Ysidro. We offer Screen Printing, Embroidery, Graphic Design, Stickers, Business Cards, Window Decal, and much more promotional products. Angel who is 36 has been in this industry for 13 years. I am 25 and have been in this industry for 8 years. Angel graduated from SDSU with a Bachelors in Graphic Design. I went to school, got an Associate in Social Work and while doing community internships for my degree I also worked full time as an Embroider. We’ve worked at prior shops before ours and got a feel on how it was like to get creative when helping someone’s idea come to life and the Do’s and Don’ts when working in customer service. We opened up our own business not only to grow as leaders and to have more time for life, but because we saw our potential on how our positive insights could help many of those who have little knowledge of the process of starting a brand name or getting anything created. Throughout time we’ve heard every complain or negative thought from our line of work and we thought it was time for a positive change by building our shop for good. We stand out a lot by keeping in mind that our customers are human, meaning we care about everybody who comes in. We can proudly say, many things about ourselves, but we stand out for our honesty and love that we put into our craft that being small or big.
“We Are Printhink, where we make a thought or idea into a physical reality”.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
How we first put initial capital into our business, it was honestly through our personal savings. We put all we had into our shop for a capital start. it was the whole topic from the start. We first started by buying our machinery and later to supplies and utilities needed. We made a pie chart on how much we had and were we where going to invest it at. Slowly our cliental began to grow, so with what we made we kept reinvesting it. The whole cycle and method we use was “get and continue to invest”, normally that’s how it starts from what we’ve experienced and from those with similar experiences. So far it’s been working for us. Obviously we have bigger goal, but we had to start somewhere to grow.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
The way our audience was built on Social Media was by the power of Networking. We are a new shop so getting our name out there first was a must do before building any platform. Once that was establish and we had a lot of people getting to know who we are, slowly our Social Media platform began to grow. The advice I would suggest is keep your Social Media platforms alive by posting on your stories to show how your day is looking like. Or even when posting I highly recommend reels for Instagram, but the catch to that is use songs or music tracks that are trending. Reason being, what usually is trending is usually the first video option people will acknowledge when getting similar sound tracks.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://printhinksd.com/
- Instagram: @printhinksd
Image Credits
Photgrapher : Vito Di Stefano IG @thevitography