We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sydney + Shea Hinckley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sydney + Shea, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

Once we committed to taking our idea to the next level, we reached out to family and friends to learn what it would take to start a business. We learned that a business is a bunch of individual working parts that come together to become a well-oiled machine, and that’s how we had to think of it in order to get here. Our first step was designing a brand. Once we had our brand, we then created our website and added our products to it. Next, we created a social media account to build awareness. Slowly, we started to grow a customer base and were able to add more pieces to our inventory, and before we knew it, we became a bonafide business. We took one step at a time and each of us learned our strengths and joy within the business and utilized those skills. Our advice to any startup would be to just keep moving forward and take on a new task each week to continue progressing. And don’t be afraid to ask for help, because it takes a village and there are so many people who are eager to help.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

We are twin sisters, seniors in high school, and we cofounded UPwords, an affirmational apparel and accessories brand. Over the last few years, we found that our self-talk was far more powerful than we ever knew, it was so impactful that we wanted to embrace and share that idea with others in a tangible manner. We are big believers in the importance of surrounding yourself with life affirming messages throughout your daily routine; we were always on the hunt for cute, comfortable, AND positive items for our own life so it felt natural to start there. When you are surrounded by positive affirmations throughout the day, you are subconsciously encouraging and retraining your mind. This is so important. We all have a negative inner critic, but it doesn’t have to define us. Upwords is designed to build you up from the inside out. You’d be surprised how far a little positivity can go to flip your negative narrative. We’d say the greatest reward is listening to customers’ stories and how our messages have impacted them. We are incredibly proud of the message we are launching into our society that we ARE enough, no matter how much social media or other things try to tell us we aren’t. It’s a simple phrase, but it moves mountains when we truly believe it about ourselves. YOU move mountains when you believe you are enough, and that is precisely our intention and what sets us apart from others.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Creating our social media was one of the most crucial parts of our business. I don’t think we realized how much it would benefit our company until we did. For us, we started following everyone and everything on social media in order for people to see us because we were such a new company. That truly made a huge difference and got us a good portion of our starting following. Now we work hard on reels and putting ourselves out there with ads. We have learned that the more you post and promote, the more sales you will receive. The work you put in is the reward you see. One of the biggest pieces of advice we would give is to truly just be yourself on your social media. In the beginning we worked hard to make it cute for others and just overall perfect that we kind of lost sight of the joy of social media; once we went back to just having fun with our company and image, we were able to grow more than ever.

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

This may sound funny, but one of the biggest lessons we had to unlearn is that success doesn’t happen overnight. We were used to seeing people on social media singlehandedly go viral and start a multi-million-dollar business overnight and we learned really quickly that’s not the case. These businesses may get huge traction overnight, but they have probably been working for a long time to earn that viral video and are working continuously to put themselves out there. Sometimes it takes years to get there, to get noticed, or to even be ready for that type of attention. We had to learn how to have patience and know that as a small startup in the beginning you aren’t even ready for that type of attention or jump in sales and starting it slow is for the best.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.shop-upwords.com/
• Instagram: @shop.upwords