We recently connected with Valerie Pampel and have shared our conversation below.

Valerie , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

As a husband wife team we have learned quickly that healthy work boundaries are a must! My wins are his wins, but at the same time his bad day can be my bad day, so we work hard at holding space for each other without taking it on. Also we are very intentional about when we talk shop. It’s hard because we both are very passionate about what we do and we get excited about it, but we have found asking permission before talking about work allows us to hold boundaries a little better if the other person isn’t there for it.

Valerie , 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?

My name is Valerie and my husband, Daniel, and I spent 15 years working for his mother’s window covering franchise in south AL before moving to CA and starting our own business from the ground up. We vacationed in Santa Barbara and I knew immediately, full body chills, that our family was meant to live here. I vocalized that to Dan, who laughed because I was born and raised where we were from and had never lived any where else. Fast forward 3 years later and we had sold our home, his mothers franchise and all of our belongings we had accumulated with three boys in tow, and moved across the country. Daniel got his contractors license and we began our business as Pampel Design Solutions, and we provided measure and installation services to existing window covering businesses in Santa Barbara. It was a lot of physical labor and not sustainable. I did part time sales for a local window covering company and her clients would call in for referrals for exterior shade and awning companies, to which her response was there’s not really anyone local that’s good. I did a little research and decided this was going to be the answer to what we were going to do now that we were in CA. Our business evolved to being an outdoor awning and shade company in 2018. By 2019 we opened a store on state street in downtown and our business grew to also include interior window coverings. We grew tremendously through the pandemic and with our PPP money we were able to open our very own in house fabrication facility. Our 6,000 sq ft sew room has transformed how we do business in Santa Barbara and it was beyond anything Dan and I could have dreamed of achieving when we sold everything and moved from Alabama. We enjoy going into our clients homes and creating spaces for them that fulfills fundamental needs, whether it be for security or comfort and enjoyment. Our community has such an amazing outdoor experience and we stay very busy building outdoor structures, sewing canopies and awnings as well as our interior window coverings. We’ve been at this now for 20 years and it is our commitment to being the best at what we do that has gotten us to where we are today.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Right before the pandemic we were dropped by one of our primary vendors. This was a small fabrication facility about an hour from us. The husband and wife team manufactured and sewed all of our stationary awnings, which is VERY popular in Santa Barbara. They were wanting to work less and travel more and so they let us know they would not be continuing on with any new jobs. They told me this on a Friday morning, and I had pending estimates that were going to be closing soon and I had no idea what I would do about that. We were so fortunate to find this sew room to begin with and the price point was such that we were able to be competitive with other companies in our area who fabricated in house. At the same time we had just signed a lease on a new, larger, warehouse space where we stored all of our products and tools. I began to panic but then thought, how hard is it to sew an awning? I’ll get a machine and do it myself and 5 minutes later I was on youtube watching videos of DIY awning manufacturing. We shifted gears and started thinking bigger than we had when it came to who we are as a business and what we provided. Dan and I began doing research on sew rooms and what all is needed. Within 3 weeks we had a functioning, bare bones, sew room. We quickly outgrow the space we were leasing and had to move in order to accommodate more machines and larger tables. Our sewer was thrilled to come on with us and help us in the process as we grew and he was a huge help to us as we navigated learning how to actual manufacture and sew these products that we were then known in our community for making!! It was a wild ride to say the least. I remember our very first client that we made an awning for and it did NOT go as planned and we ended up sewing that one awning 4 times before we got it right! lol One of my favorite acronyms is FAIL= First Attempt In Learning. It is so true and something we have done often over the last few years, but it has allowed us to become one of the best at what we do!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

That women are not as efficient as men when it comes to construction. Working in the very deep south, I learned early on that the people on construction sites are primarily men and they only want to deal with other men. It was something I had accepted and tried my best to navigate but it was not easy. I would have men try to take my tape and measure for me, or would flat out not let me measure the windows claiming “I build this house and the windows are all the same” – even though I measured down to the 1/16″ and very few windows are perfectly square! I left job sites in tears as construction workers followed me around a house watching my every move, cat calling and making other demoralizing comments. I would have new clients call and during the intake process when I let them know I’d be the one coming out, they would straight up ASK for a man to measure. Can you imagine? My margin of error is effectively non existent so the joke was ultimately on them. I remember once explaining to a male client that I had been using a tape measure for over 10 years and I could guarantee they would have no issues. It’s just wild to think back on.

Moving to California has been EYE OPENING. When I show up to a job site here, my clients fully expect and appreciate my experience and expertise at what I do. On top of that the construction sites are a nice mix of men AND women. It’s been a great honor to work with some of the most amazing female contractors, architects and designers in this area. There is not a day that goes by when I’m at work that I don’t appreciate being treated as an equal to the other professional males that I’m working along side of. I’m slowly getting used to the fact that when I talk to another contractor about concrete footings or the execution of any installation details they aren’t discriminating because the information is being delivered by a woman.

Contact Info:

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