We recently connected with Sharmene Smith and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Sharmene, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
In September 2012, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). I had never heard of it before my diagnosis so I began to research more about it. That search lead me to the PCOS Challenge: The National Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Association based in Atlanta, GA. As I started to get involved with attending PCOS events and races, I found that my fellow PCOS community members were having difficulty finding nice teal and PCOS related apparel and gifts, so I made it my mission to solve this issue. The PCOS Gift Shop was added to BGT Gifts as a collection of clothing and gifts that promote advocacy and awareness.
Every September, we donate a portion of sales towards the PCOS Challenge to further research and advocacy efforts. We’re hoping to grow our shop beyond our e-commerce store and PCOS events, where we can offer PCOS products in retail stores.
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 background and context?
BGT Gifts was officially founded in 2018 after I left my corporate job as a Program Manager at a prestigious university. Together with my husband and mom, we created BGT Gifts formerly known as Baskets Gifts and Things LLC with the hopes of taking our love of creating gifts to a new level.
One of my duties at my corporate office was to create promotional and marketing gifts to promote the research information and registry that I was in charge of. Through my five years of gifting experience, I gained an unique perspective of helping our clients build relationships through gifting. Our products range from gift boxes to individual products like mugs, tumblers, and other stationery items.
BGT Gifts continues to help small businesses and clients to achieve their messaging and brand needs through gifts. In addition, we provide unique gifts with a personal touch that you may not find any store. We feature artwork from artists that we have relationships with.
We believe in leaving a meaningful, lasting impact through our products and helping our clients reduce the stress of finding the perfect gift and increase the peace of mind knowing all aspects of the process will be handled timely and professionally.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the main lessons that I had to unlearn in business is that you can’t expect others to move at the pace that you expect them to move. I used to be guilty of giving out ideas to fellow entrepreneurs or business owners with the hope of collaborating on a project. Sometimes those ideas had deadlines that were missed or ignored, which would leave me without a potential new audience or sales that could have come from the deal. Often times, these collaboration were with businesses who had a bigger customer base than myself and needed what I was offering but for whatever reason didn’t make it a priority to follow through. This no action would leave me in a place of disappointment and stagnation because I was dwelling (wasting time) on what could have been instead of what could be. For the last year or so, I had to go through a period where I kept to myself and really evaluated the relationships that I had around me and realized that some of them were no longer needed for me to succeed with growing my business. As slow as it’s moving, I have seen momentum with our business. I learn that as long as we’re moving forward (even with baby steps), that we’re making progress no matter what others are doing or not doing.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
In June of this year, we had to pivot as I was having health issues that was impacting my every day functions. The health issues have recently gotten better but it made us realize how important physical health and work/life balance is. In addition, we were extremely unhappy with the direction of our business and felt like we were going in circles.
When we made the decision, I wrote the following post on our social media pages:
Sometimes, you have to sit, reflect, and do some self evaluation when you are a business owner. I’ve been guilty of trying to “be like everyone else”, “follow trends and industry leaders”, or simply “hustling to survive”, instead of truly walking in who I am as an owner and the vision that God gave our family for our business. I am so grateful to my husband and mom for letting me try so many things over the years even the bad learning experiments lol.
Truthfully, I’ve never fit in EVER and every time I’ve tried, it’s cost me….ME! I don’t understand how I thought our business would be any different.
So here it is….we’re scraping about 90% of our website products and starting completely from scratch. You have no IDEA how much anxiety and fear I have felt over this decision but we want to be authentic to who we are as designers.
“A Gift for You” is one of our branded boxes. We’ll be using these as our very own branded boxes along with a few other collections we’re launching this year. Our best selling products have always been those given to me or my family through prayer and staying true to ourselves so we’re doing it the way we should have done from the beginning.
It was extremely difficult to show this level of transparency but we felt it was absolutely necessary to share the ups and the downs with our customers.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bgtgifts.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/BGTGifts
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/BGTGifts
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/baskets-gifts-and-things
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/BGTGifts
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH_M7X9zVFe7_OjZRCUVnpQ
- Other: TikTok – www.tiktok.com/BGTGifts.com
Image Credits
The baby image in the baby basket was illustrated by Jamesha Bazemore of Cocoa Twins.