We recently connected with Shari Dionne and have shared our conversation below.
Shari Dionne, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Shari Dionne was started by Will Nickens Jr. and Shari Dionne. The brand story started out as a love story. Will and Shari began dating in January of 2018. Will, a Cleveland, OH native at the time resided in Dallas and Shari born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area met in Dallas. The weekend fling turned into the real thing. The couple is now married with two beautiful girls. The Nickens reside in Los Angeles and have started a luxury eyewear brand. While dating long distance they spent many weekends on the road from Dallas to LA and LA to Dallas. To keep things fresh they would travel to other states and countries for dates from New Orleans and Miami, to Cancun, Cabo, and Puerto Rico. Everywhere they went people would compliment Shari’s style. But it was just something about her swagger when she wore eyewear that made people compliment her even more. So the couple decided to start their own luxury eyewear brand so others could experience that same since of confidence and compliments on their vacations or just through their everyday walks of life. At the same time they wanted people to be able to protect their eyes from UV light in a fashionable way. After a year into their relationship the Shari Dionne brand was born. The brand is now 5 years old and it is now more than eyewear as they have added a luxury swimsuit line to their arsenal. Our next endeavor will be adding a kid’s collection!
Shari, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Will Nickens Jr. has a Masters degree in marketing and has started a few fashion brands in the past before settling in with the Shari Dionne brand.
Shari Dionne Nickens has been wearing eyewear her entire life. It was once required for vision purposes prior to getting lasik eye surgery.
We have over 100 different styles ranging from polarized, UV400, and anti-blue light lenses. Our eyewear stands out with our trademarked Wing logo. So just remember one thing, if it doesn’t got the wing it ain’t the real thing!
Our glasses have been spotted on a number of celebrities and influencers such as comedian Michael Blackson and his fiancée Rada Darling, Brandi Maxiell from VH1’s Basketball Wives, Former women’s NCAA standout basketball twins, the Gonzalez twins, reality TV star Yasmine Lopez, “Yummy”, and Charisse Mills from Zeus network TV show “One Mo Chance among others.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
When we first started the business we were all over the place. We knew glasses were are main product but we tried to expand to to many product lines to quickly. We started producing shirts, sweaters, hats and more before even knew where the business was going and where we wanted to take it. We had to pivot and scale back quickly and learned we needed to focus on being good at one thing first to grow the brand before we scale to different products. We eventually add a swimsuit collection but that launch was more inline with our overall goal and a great compliment to our eyewear collection.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
As a business owner you have to be bold and never afraid to share with people that you have a business and how it can be helpful to them. I remember being in Vegas one weekend before we had a website and had just started our social media account. I seen two influencers that I had been following for awhile and they both had over 1 million followers. Without hesitation I went over to them to tell them about our eyewear business we had just started and would be officially launching in a few months. We sent them some eyewear and without any expectations they posted about our eyewear on Instagram. This helped us gain confidence in our decision to start our business. It gave us content we could repurpose and gave our initial followers confidence in our business as well. Since then we have been reaching out to influencers online and it has been fruitful to our business and online presence. What we learned is never be afraid to tell people about your business no matter how big people seem or how small you feel. Everywhere you go is an opportunity to find people that look like your ideal customer and you should approach them and ask them to follow your business. Of course it is important to perfect your approach.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://byShariDionne.com
- Instagram: bysharidionne
- Facebook: bysharidionne
- Twitter: bysharidionne
