We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Wendy & Trevon Brehm/Williams a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Wendy & Trevon, 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.
One day, Wendy had a commercially-produced candle lit while she was doing homework (back in the college days), and her hair caught on fire even though she was not sitting anywhere near the candle. This was the first thing that prompted us to think about what goes into the items we have in our home. We had some free time on our hands so we decided to experiment with making candles. Wendy fell in love. There was not a lot of other small Deaf-owned business that made candles at the time so it seemed like an exciting opportunity. As time went on, and through the pandemic, we realized there was more of a need for holistically created home and body products as well as wellness education. It was then we started exploring how we could best meet that need and the idea for a self-paced wellness program began. Three years later, we have not yet launched that program as we still need more funding (grant applications galore!), but our business has grown tremendously in that time. Trevon left his job in August 2021 to become a stay-at-h0me dad and become a huge part of the day-to-day operations of our business. He is truly the muscle and craft behind the scenes!
Wendy & Trevon, 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?
Wendy is a 26-year old female-identifying person who loves to create magic with her hands during her spare time! She also works full-time as a Sr. Legal and Compliance Analyst for Communication Service for the Deaf, Inc. Trevon is a 28-year old male-identifying person who has really leaned into the benefits of self-care and mental health awareness. As a Black man, he’s found that there’s not a lot of people who look like him and share the same lived experiences actively talking about mental health and providing resources for Black men and other marginalized communities.
Together, they are the parents of a bubbly almost-2 year old, Luna Rose who is the “supervisor” behind all things Purple Rose Wellness. They hope that this brand and this business will be something that stays in the family for a long, long time.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
When our daughter was born, we had a longing for something that was our own more than ever and wanted to truly lean into and grow this business, but we could not do it with our schedules at the time. Childcare is also ridiculously expensive where we live (and everywhere) so the logical next step was for Tre to leave work and we’d dive into this full-time. Even so, with Wendy working full-time its been hard to juggle it all. We value mental and physical health and realized we could not pour into our customers and our products if we weren’t doing well ourselves. We began to prioritize non-working days and take time off to lean into ourselves, our family and the small things that bring us joy. This is the only thing that has made it possible for us to stay open the past two years.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
We met in high school but did not start dating until Wendy’s first year of college. It’s been history since then. Wendy is such a busy, creative, active spirit, and Trevon is so down-to-earth and has a go-with-the-flow mentality. We balance each other out so well in life and in business.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.purplerosewellness.com
- Instagram: @purplerosewellness
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/purplerosewellness/