We recently connected with Sarah Shaw and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, appreciate you joining us today. Before we talk about all of your success, let’s start with a story of failure. Can you open up about a time when you’ve failed?

I had a very successful handbag company called Sarah Shaw Handbags. Over 5 years we grew to over $1M in annual sales, were in 1200 stores in the USA, including Bloomingdales, Saks 5th Ave, Nordstrom Barney’s, Henri Bendel, and Bergdorf Goodman. I had handbags in the movies Legally Blonde, Ocean’s 11 and America’s Sweetheart as well as on TV shows like Friends and Will & Grace. Celebrities Sharon Stone, Jennifer Aniston, and Oprah had all used my bags. I was on the TV shows Access Hollywood and E! Entertainment.

I had investors, 5 employees, did 3-5 trade shows a year, and had showrooms in NYC, LA, Atlanta and Dallas. Life was great.

After 9/11, when things were very dark in America, and there were virtually no sales in Q4, and I lost my investors in January of 2002. This was the beginning of the end for my company.

I quickly reached out to some other investors that has expressed interest in my company after seeing a front page business story on my company in the Los Angeles Times. These guys had helped grow Kate Spade’s company from $26-70 Million so I hoped they could take me from $1-10 million. I was excited.

Unfortunately, I didn’t want to go in the same direction they saw for my brand so I ended up closing is down at the end of 2002 after paying my creditors 70 cents on the dollar and avoiding bankruptcy.

This was a very sad time for me and I didn’t know what to do with my life. All I knew how to do was make handbags and babysit.

But…after a few months of doing some random consulting for other accessory brands in LA, which I really enjoyed, I created and patented a closet organizer for handbags that I thought was genius and was going to be my next big thing.

After the patent was issued I went full steam ahead selling this new product. Within 2 years I was in over 400 stores, had sold $500,000 of product and had a licensing deal with a closet organizing company.

I used all my hard won knowledge that I’d learned over 5 years selling handbags, learned a few new modern tricks, taught myself photoshop, how to build a website, email marketing and shortly after that Facebook.

I had that second company called Simply Sarah for 8 years until my patent expired. During this time I consulted with many brands teaching them how to get products to celebrities, get Press for themselves and how to sell yourself to store buyers.

In 2009, some friends encouraged me to start a consulting business teaching up and coming designers how to navigate this business. I have been doing it ever since and love it. Helping others learn how to solve problems is what I am really good at. My secret sauce is that I can see their problems before they even know they’re coming and can offer solutions to avoid costly mistakes and mishaps.

Sarah, 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?

Ok, so this might sounds nuts, but I have started ALL of my 6 businesses because someone suggested that I start a company because of something I did or said. Seriously.

I started my first business called Raggs to Order after I found a clothing designer to make me a few things for an Actor on a movie I was working on. Some other costume designer friends knew about it and asked me if he could make clothes for their movies. One of the movies turned out to be Forrest Gump. He suggested we start a business making clothes for movies so we did. I found the jobs, and he made the clothes. We manufactured costumes for huge movies like Matrix 2&3, Oceans’s 11, Windtalkers, and many others. We closed it after 12 years when movies were all going overseas.

My second company was called Rack and Roll Rentals which was a wardrobe trailer rental business for the movies. A friend suggested we build a trailer so that we could rent it to our own movies instead of renting someone else’s. I was in. We had this business for 15 years and built 3 total trailers and sold it for a huge profit in 2013.

My 3rd company was my Handbag Business, Sarah Shaw Handbags which I started on a dare. I sold over $1M a year of my handbags. You already read a lot about this company. This was the first business that I actually loved, and threw my heart into up to this point.. I poured my soul into it.

My 4th company was called Style Council. I started this in 2003 with a friend after I closed my handbag company. We were like the first Amazon store for products other than books. We created a website for companies that didn’t yet sell online and promoted them to celebrities and magazines to get PR and via our website. We had huge successful hits in People Magazine with a necklace and some PJ’s that we got to Jennifer Aniston and sold over of 2000 of each. It was amazing. We closed this company in 2005 as my friend wanted to open a store and I didn’t.

My 5th company was called Simply Sarah which I started on my own in late 2005 with a lot of encouragement from friends and colleagues who wanted me to sell my patented HandBag Organizer. I shared some of this story previously. This business was a HUGE growth experience for me as I was able to take everything I’d learned from my handbag business and Style Council and move into the new future of tech and selling online. It was thrilling. In 2 years I got into over 400 stores and grossed over $500,000. Sold to distributors in Australia and Japan and got tons of PR. I licensed my patent to a large closet organizing company and we both sold it until the patent expired in 2014. I closed it down that year as my consulting was my main focus.

During this time, I was teaching classes for Ladies who Launch and all the women with products they were developing came to my classes and they were packed. So again, two friends suggested I start teaching product designers how to sell millions, get press and work with celebs. I thought it sounded nuts. Who would pay me for what’s in my head? They laughed and asked if I followed any of the new life coaches out there. Of course I said no. They pointed out that they were making tons of money helping people figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. At least I would be working with people who already KNEW what they wanted to do. They made it sound easy. It wasn’t.

I was pregnant with twins at the time and was up a lot at night. One night I was thinking about this idea of theirs to start coaching, and the name Entreprenette came to me. I sat down and bought the domain and filed the TM at 3 am. I had no idea what I’d do with it, but the name was awesome.

About 6 months later I hired a business coach who taught me how to be a coach, how to lay out my coaching programs, mainly she showed me how to get what was in my head out into the world. It was amazing. I loved it. I started my Entreprenette coaching program in 2009 and have been doing this ever since. I love working with all kinds of designers. My favorite part is my group coaching calls because I never know what anyone is going to ask me and I do my best brainstorming during these “on the spot” moments in life. These men and women are so important to me. I hope they always know and feel that.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

These days I work with fashion, accessory and gift designers teaching them how I sold millions of my own products. I am the only person (that I know of) that offers this type of complete coaching program. I teach designers how to get their products into Boutiques, How to pitch Magazine Editors, and how to get their products into celebrity hands.

I think what makes me successful is that I am real and honest about everything that I endured and overcame with my own accessory businesses, and don’t keep any secrets about anything. I am always willing to share my thoughts and ideas as well as little innuendos that are not talked about in books, and that I have boots on the ground history and success behind me.

I always have a “skin in the game feeling” about all the people I work with. Their success is always on my mind. I go out of my way to help them find the “right” celebrities to go after, the best magazines for their brands, and always make any intros when possible to store buyers I know personally.

My clients are important to me and so is their success.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

When I started my handbag business I was still doing costumes for movies. I wanted to be sure it was 100% solid before I quit my day job. I’d been selling to friends and on TV and movie sets, and a few local stores in Los Angeles, but had not ventured outside of LA yet.

So one day my friend and business partner on another business I had making clothes for movies, started making clothes for Anthropologie. I asked him if his buyer could bring the handbag buyer around to look at my line. She agreed after seeing a photo of my hero bag which was a small shopper made of red pool table felt and cut with pinking shears along the edges – you know those zigzag scissors. Anyhow, she loved the bag, asked me to make a larger size and after a few months of back and forth she ordered 800 of them for the then 13 stores and their new website. I freaked out. I had recently moved my production to a real factory and actually knew how to get everything made by then.

So…… I quit my job working in film and decided to go for it 100%. It was very exciting.

It took a couple months to get the order ready for them and when it arrived in my tiny 200 sq. foot office I realized there was a problem with every single bag. The glue that held the layers together didn’t melt all the way and I had to hand iron all 800 bags and repackage them. It took me 3 days of ironing to fix this problem. But, I did it, figured out how to pack it all according to their extensive shipping guide and got it out the door on time. Whew.

A couple months later I was in NYC for a Trade Show, Just having secured a fancy showroom there, I was out to lunch and saw a woman wearing one of my bags. I approached her and asked where she got the bag. She replied, “Oh isn’t is fab, I got it at Anthropologie in SOHO. It’s by a new designer named Sarah Shaw. I was so excited. And, I didn’t tell her I was me. I sort of regret that. It was the first time I’d seen someone outside of Los Angeles on the street wearing my bag. It was thrilling and worth all the ironing!

This gave me even more assurance that I was on the right path.     

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sarahshawconsulting.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahshawconsulting/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SarahShawConsulting

Image Credits
none