We were lucky to catch up with Taylor Brown recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Taylor, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

After moving from apartment to apartment and collecting meaningless and boring items, or even nothing at all when moving into a new apartment, we realized the critical need for a curated gift that leaves a lasting first impression. As we explored this need, we discovered that others were yearning for that genuine welcome! There is nothing like receiving a gift that is curated specifically for you.

We understand that the gifting industry is one that is duplicable, so to set ourselves apart from other companies, we decided to hone in on apartment gifting and focus on highlighting local brands and creators in the DMV.

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

I am a former interior designer and devoted almost 9yrs of my life to the architectural side of design. Although I truly enjoyed interior design and all the growth that came from the career, I always had an entrepreneurial itch to drive my own design projects. My mother, Maria, and I began Freshly Minted Studio as a side business after identifying the need, but once COVID began and I was working from home I decided to commit more time to see where we could take this business.

My sister, Chase, who is the Creative Production Director joined the team about 6 months ago, Chase was a former merchandiser and buyer in the apparel/bedding industry.

Our family has always loved gifting to friends & family! Growing up (and still to this day) we would have competitions on who could create the most creative gift when the family got together around the holidays. As you can imagine, it would get super competitive!

Our vision for our brand is to evolve into a lifestyle brand, which provides much more than just gifting. Stay tuned for the studio growth!

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

The realization that our side hustle needed to transition to full time came once we landed a 2,500 gift holiday order that required us to take off of work from our full-time jobs at the time just to complete the order. We even had to hire additional help. We believe that served as validation that if we committed more time and focus to our business, the potential is unlimited. This was definitely a major milestone for our business that led to us being more intentional about our business growth.

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

This has been our first calendar year committing 40+ hours to Freshly Minted Studio and it has been a year filled with learning how to run our business and what the best approaches are to scale and expand. We hired an amazing business coach, Claire Conway from @ringletstudio to understand how to best reach our target audience, how to grow our business financially and manage payroll, and how to set aggressive business goals.

Our industry, similar to many industries has peak and slower seasons. As our target clients are busiest in the Spring and Summer, the winter season can be slower as the number of people moving is significantly less. We had never attempted to gift anything outside of apartment gifts and decided to take a risk for the Valentine’s Day holiday.
We created our first reel promoting a non-gift box, and captured product photos on our kitchen table in our apartment and then uploaded the content to both our instagram and website and simply waited. The window for purchasing was tight as the holiday was 2weeks away and we needed sufficient time for production and delivery. The outcome was overwhelming and we completely sold-out in just a few days! This was also the first time we ever listed any product online. Navigating how to setup eCommerce and understanding the fees was challenging, but so worth it to see how many clients we impacted through gifting!

Contact Info:

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

Image Credits
photography all from @urbanchicmedia