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

Sara, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, one thing many business owners consider is donating a percentage of sales or profits to an organization or cause. We’d love to hear your thoughts and the story behind how and why you chose the cause or organization you donate to.

We launched our travel memento company, Woz Here Co., alongside a volunteer event that I’ve run for the past seven years, RVA Brunch Weekend. The event concept is simple: we partner with over 30 local restaurants who all agree to donate a portion of proceeds to our charity benefactor. We promote their participation in the event, have free peaches donated to participating restaurants and do a kickoff event the night before with live music, a vendor market, food trucks and a live raffle.

One smaller piece of the event is creating custom t-shirt designs that promote the event and serve as a fun keepsake for supporters. This year, my sister and my small business, Woz Here Co., created the t-shirt designs. We used this opportunity to soft launch our new sister-owned company. We knew that our friends and family already support the event, so there would be a built-in network of people we knew would support us. We also really believe in the cause that we were raising money for, so we donated 100% of net proceeds from the t-shirt sales to the charity benefactor, the Richmond SPCA. We ask the restaurants to donate a portion of weekend proceeds, so this was our opportunity to put our money where our mouth was and help fundraise.

We chose to fundraise for the Richmond SPCA because my sister and I have both adopted dogs from rescues, so we know what an impact those funds can have on the lives of animals in need.

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

Woz Here Co. is a brand new company, so we’re sure you haven’t met us yet — but we’re happy to meet you now! We are a sister duo that celebrates travel with hand-drawn, unique travel souvenirs including stickers, tote bags, ornaments, coffee mugs and magnets. We let you focus on making the travel memories and we’ll make the keepsake travel mementos.

My sister, Louanne and I have bonded in adulthood by our shared love of travel. We lovingly call our trips ‘Sister Trips’ and have ventured to Austin, Las Vegas, Toronto, Louisville, New Bern, Joshua Tree, St. Petersburg, Palm Springs, Milwaukee and more together.

Our inspiration for the company is simple — we both like unique travel souvenirs from our Sister Trips — Sara’s big on coasters and Louanne is a sucker for a fun ornament.

While we’re often told that we look alike, we are quite different. Louanne is the talented artist behind all of our Woz Here Co. designs, and I am the digital expert bringing Louanne’s artwork into your homes and hearts. Louanne’s style is pen and watercolor designs and are intended to pop with fun colors as stickers on your water bottle or on your fridge as a magnet.

We both love to vacation and have a memorable travel memento from our favorite travel destinations. However, it’s annoying to make time to find a gift shop while traveling, and then carry around your travel souvenirs from location to location, trying your best to make sure it doesn’t break while cramming it into an already stuffed suitcase. That’s where our idea for the company came in; we can design travel keepsakes that you can buy online before, during or after your trip. It’ll save you precious luggage space AND help support a small, woman-owned business.

Our goal for Woz Here Co. is simple — we want to make unique, hand-drawn travel mementos that will make you smile when you think about that trip you went on. We plan to continue to release new products that represent more places so that you can rely on us to continue to celebrate a well-traveled life.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Woz Here Co., is a sister-run company, and I’m the younger sister, so I’ve known my sister for every moment of my life, but I’d love to highlight how we ended up in business together. I’ve run a food-themed Instagram for many years now (@RichmondBrunch) and a related event for seven years (RVA Brunch Weekend). I also used to work in digital marketing, so I’ve always been curious about how people make money online with passive revenue and affiliate marketing. I filed it away as a “later” option because I knew I didn’t want to commit to the learning curve.

Then my sister once saw an Instagram of a girl who said she made six figures from selling stickers. My sister can draw and said, “I could do better,” and I countered with, “Then prove it.”

Now we’re in business together proving to ourselves that we really can do it! We saw some early success throwing up a few designs onto Etsy and people buying them before we even did any marketing, so we’re really excited to commit to growing our business and seeing where we can take it.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

I both loved and hated finding our vendor. We quickly narrowed it down to one company, I got some samples and I really liked the product. It was a great quality and the turnaround time was fast. Then we did the math and realized that the margins weren’t there and we’d need a different sticker vendor. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos and ordered some samples from a second company. Similarly, I liked the vivid print of the stickers and the stood up to being washed regularly on my water bottle, so I thought we had found our vendor. Then, we read about their political views that certainly did not align with our own. We wanted to align our support with a company we believed in, so I was back on the Internet trying to find a third vendor.

Fingers crossed, but I found a third sticker vendor that we also really like and will stick with (pun intended)! Their production time is slower, but the product and customer service has meet our needs.

The lessons I learned was to keep iterating and that you don’t have to settle. When cost became an issue, I pivoted and found another option. When ideologically we needed to switch, I found another option. It’s your company, and you need to keep researching to find the vendor who will align best with your needs and pricing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.wozhereco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wozhereco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wozhereco
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@WozHereCo