We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Verazonda Walker a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Verazonda thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

At 36, my world was turned upside down and seemed to start spinning faster when I was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. For over 2 years I went through 4 surgeries and 16 rounds of chemo, to be told that it didn’t kill the cancer and that it was aggressive. I then went through 28 radiation sessions, depression & anxiety, and a sense of loosing my mind. On 2 different occasions my mom and aunt told me that it wasn’t going to be the cancer that killed me, but the stress. That scared me after hearing it the 2nd time. I worked during the entire chemo stage while under the most stress at work that I had ever endured. The company which I had been employed for 6 years was purchased by another company and had the worst transition I had ever seen. During my radiation treatments I decided that it was entirely too stressful to deal with fighting cancer and fighting the obstacles at work and took a medical leave of absence. I decided to focus strictly on my health and fighting the cancer, though myself and mother assumed that since the chemo didn’t work, chances were neither would the radiation. I was in a very bad mental space. I made a post on FB about no longer knowing what my purpose was. Several people made comments, but one particular person reached out to me and we met up a few days later. For years this person wanted to speak with me about business, but with my career, 3 kids, group commitments etc, I never made time to talk. She suggested that I go into partnership with her. I was actually a customer of hers for years. She sold me several sweat suits from her trunk. We had plenty of the same ideas in our notebooks. From there I knew that it was only God sending me a message through her. I immediately started the process of making us official, took majority of the money I had in my checking and savings account and bam, we opened up a clothing store in less than 1 month after meeting up.

Verazonda, 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?

The future looks bright for Dodge City Apparel. I know that we can only go up from here. I have put all of my money towards making this business successful. We had no help getting this started. No loans, no grants, no nothing. I feel blessed to know that after working corporate jobs for 20 plus years, I can finally say that I am happy. If I had never been diagnosed with cancer, I would have never taken a step out on faith to start my own business. I have always done side jobs/hobbies to try to make extra income. Being an entrepreneur will allow me to be able to attend my kids activities without worry. It can also help me help my community. At Dodge City Apparel our goal is help other small businesses become successful, as we fight through our struggles to become successful in our own lane. I do have to say that our location is not ideal for a clothing store due to poverty and high crime in the area. I plan to work with the city to improve to the look of our shopping strip, to make it more welcoming to everyone that lives in our city. Eventually we could expand our business, allow our part time employees to get more hours, build our online presence & provide other businesses with the opportunity to showcase their talent and business during our once per month “sidewalk sales” where we allow vendors to showcase their businesses. We plan to help bring more positive exposure to the people, especially the children of our community. They need to see that with hard work and dedication, they could literally do ANYTHING. Here it was a year ago I was fighting to live. Here I am a year later thriving and headed toward success. At Dodge City Apparel we preach body positivity. In women clothes we ensure to have items for petite to plus. We carry sizes small to 5X in both men and women clothing. Due to our small space we are growing our online presence and offer preorders opposed to OVERstocking the store. This will allow us the opportunity to still sell ALL categories of clothing without having to again over fill our location with inventory.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Where to start? I can say that there was no real plan to funding the business because this vision was given to us by God. It was all apart of his plan. I have always been good with money. I always save especially for a rainy day because you never know what obstacles may occur in your life. Prior to 2019 before I built my home, I already set up my payroll account at work to automatically take $500 from my check to go straight to my savings account. I couldn’t afford to put that to the side, but I knew I needed to save money so I had to make that sacrifice. I did this for so long that every now and then I would be like “I need to find another job, I’m not making enough” then it would hit me “girl you crazy, you forgot $500 automatically comes out your check”. I had done it so long that I barely missed the money. I did this up until the last paycheck I received from work in 2022. I believe I started this process in 2018 after a promotion. I had also done this at my previous job, but on a smaller scale, like $100-$200 per paycheck. When we originally opened the store we started off with just men clothing because that’s what my business partner had been selling out of her trunk since 2004. As DAYS went on I started ordering women items and stocking the store fully. This also included buying everything necessary to run a successful store. This included a brand new IPad, a used Shopify POS system that I found at a reasonable price on Facebook Marketplace, software, internet service, I added another line to my phone bill so that our customers could contact us, marketing material, permits, signs etc. The list goes on. I felt that since my business partner had some inventory already, I should have no problem taking care of everything else. When I tell you I went from 5K to over 20K in a matter of weeks, I had to push down on the breaks because my savings were quickly depleting and I did not like that. I started making better decisions on spending and decided that I would not buy any more inventory until we got the bulk of what was there, out. That was a quick lesson for me to learn. The unfortunate thing is you can’t please everyone. There’s no way possible, so instead I decided I would do things on my terms, not everyone else’s.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media advertising is hard. It is so time consuming and is a job all on its own. Years ago I was so obsessed with Facebook and instagram that I planned on becoming a blogger. Work got in the way & priorities changed which made me change my efforts in becoming a blogger. If I knew what I knew now about social media, I would have taken blogging more seriously because the momentum & attention I had back then, could have built me an empire sooner, but that obviously was not his plan. I have to post, post, post and more posting daily just to keep people’s attention. For a while I was like “I can’t be on this phone all day, I have stuff to do” but that never stopped. I’ll take a break just to put my phone down for a few days, but then I feel so behind. I’ve heard the saying that you can’t trust someone who is always on the phone when you’re with them, but never answer your calls. I don’t believe that because I’ll be sitting on my phone all day working, making flyers, creating future posts etc, my phone will be in my hand ringing & I won’t answer because I know I’ll get side tracked from the task at hand. Unfortunately, that’s the way I choose to prioritize what I have to do. It makes some of my friends and family annoyed with me, but I don’t care. If they know me, they know I must be doing something important or resting if I don’t answer. If they still get annoyed, they just haven’t learned me yet. People will not understand if you don’t explain it to them, so that’s on you to help them understand your process. I set my phone to automatically go to do not disturb from 9pm-8am. This helps me shut down the evening and gives me more time to take care of my business. I do this to ensure I don’t get distracted with phone conversations or texts, so anything that is sent I won’t see until the morning when I wake up. I am very bad a setting boundaries, but this is one thing that I won’t give up. I have to have some type of order or discipline in my chaotic life. Between Dr appointments, children extracurricular activities, therapy, physical therapy and so much more, I need that wine down time with just myself. One thing I’ve learned is just because they aren’t liking your posts, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t WATCHING. Keep posting as much as you can because I promise they see it. Right now I have less than 2K followers on my business page, but it is growing and that’s all I can ask for. I will keep putting in the work and help it grow until it can’t grow anymore. I started using reels which helps me understand that people are watching, just not liking and I’ve accepted that. It comes with the territory of trying to build a business and online presence in this day and age. Again keep posting, they are definitely watching and one day you will get the right person to repost your content and it can blow up from there. Again keep posting. Don’t ever allow someone else’s action determine your success.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shopdodgecityapparel.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/shopdodgecityapparel
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=100092481605059
• Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCbqyhI0ksbsKmru6amZEcdw?fbclid=PAAaa_XnMp9KduhIjidfvFwVdathRlW3cDTcvHqijRdAXjyciRPb2Copvr_yQ_aem_AfF2ZsxWdapIgLJrB6oqBAzIlFnLC4jaGXOIcjzTKWLCgX2DZRklBAVHcb8cD8M1kao
• Yelp: https://m.yelp.com/biz/dodge-city-apparel-covington?primary_source=biz_details&secondary_source=nav_bar&share_id=69B55C54-8BF3-491F-B959-3BE523438FE1&uid=SjDft8NIyC74bgxbseZ9Bw&utm_source=ishare
• Other: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@dodgecityapparelllc?_t=8jH7JhsFSrH&_r=1

Image Credits
Verafied Visions Photography