We were lucky to catch up with Sommer Grandchamp recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sommer, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I had ZERO plans for starting another business when I created Discreet Journal.

In 2018 I quit my corporate job to start a women’s business conference. The process was beautiful, but brutal. It burned me out within 6 months and a major mental break led me to therapy.

In therapy, I was diagnosed with severe OCD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Symptoms had been prominent for most of my life, but I had been misdiagnosed for 12 years, which meant I never got treatment.

I dedicated an hour weekly to therapy and committed to working on my mental health in between sessions. I wanted therapy workbooks to work on at a coffee shop or in my office, but I couldn’t find any books that felt discreet enough to bring out of the house. So I created my own in an old notebook.

I started bringing my old notebook with self-created journal prompts to my therapy sessions and my therapist asked me to self publish my journal so that her other clients could use it.

Over the next few months, word started spreading about my journals and I decided to launch the idea into a business!

2 years later, we have several editions of the original journal I created and we have sent over 2000 journals across the world.

Sommer, 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?

I’m a 20-something gal with harm-OCD (look it up!) who spent years getting misdiagnosed. When I started seeing a DBT specialist, I wanted tools to keep me stable in between sessions. The recommended therapy books said something like “WORKING ON MY DEPRESSION” on the front cover. They’d always end up buried in my sock drawer. So, I created a discreetly designed journal with therapy prompts. This became Discreet Journal – a wellness workbook.

I am most proud of the messages I receive on social media from people saying they felt less alone after hearing my story. And especially people who have used the journal and felt like it was the only tool they’d found that was easy enough to keep using.

I love that I never feel like I have to SELL my journals. When people see them, they totally get it. They’re inexpensive and easy to use. Many of our customers order another after they finish their first one. How cool is that?!

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

When I started Discreet Journal, I purchased the first 250 unit order with my personal savings. When I opened up my website to the public and people started purchasing journals, I had no packaging, no idea how to mail them, no inserts or marketing material. I just shipped the journals in a flimsy mailer with nothing else inside.

I knew I needed to sell 86 journals to fund the next purchase order along with some marketing materials and nicer packaging. I’ve increased my average purchase order from 250 to 1000 journals which lowers the unit cost and I know that I need to sell about 140 journals to make enough money for the next purchase order.

I did not utilize any fancy tools to fund my business. Just a personal $500 investment and a lot of unshakable optimism.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn “hustle”. In my first entrepreneurship endeavor, I was all about the hustle. I never slowed down, felt guilty for resting, had sickening anxiety, and quit after 1 year.

With Discreet Journal, I had to unlearn that “faster and harder is better”. When I need a break, I take a break. Do sales slow down? Yes. But I come back with more energy and creativity to jump into my next marketing endeavor and end up increasing sales in the next quarter.

I built this business to fit my lifestyle instead of changing my lifestyle to fit my business.

Contact Info:

• Website: Discreetjournal.com
• Instagram: Instagram.com/discreetjournal
• Facebook: facebook.com/discreetjournal
• Other: pinterest.com/discreetjournal

Image Credits
Shaye Briannah