Today we’d like to introduce you to Eloise Stewart.
Hi Eloise, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
The path to owning my business has not been linear. My story is based on leveraging skills, adapting, and not being afraid to lean into the curves and turns on my career path.
Going into college, I knew I wanted to be in some form of design. But at 18, it’s hard to know what you will be a good fit for. I missed the deadline to apply to the Interior Design program, so I picked Apparel Design and signed up for the freshman class. I was fascinated by the industry, and I never left the major! I found a love for design and development, and I had my first “see and fill the need” moment through my student involvement. I wanted to curate an experience to better showcase my peer’s designs, and I co-founded “The Fashion Event,” a student-run fashion show that now garners 1,000+ attendees. This planted the seed for my passion of uplifting others and helping tell their story. After graduating with my Bachelor’s from Auburn, I returned to pursue a Masters in Consumer Behavior. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, I worked with students in and out of the classroom, and it was during this time that I discovered my passion for teaching and mentorship.
After graduating with my Master’s, I moved to Montgomery for my first apparel design job – at a hunting apparel company. I had never hunted in my life, but I was hired because of my ability to sell myself and my technical skills in design and production. Two years into the job and the week after my honeymoon, I was let go with a few other employees.
Soon after losing my job, the Apparel Design department at Auburn University reached out and asked if I could come teach for a year while they filled three tenure track professor positions. I quickly said yes and embarked on one of the most challenging years of my career – at only 24 years old!
I taught many courses, developed an updated curriculum based on the industry, advised the student organization, and took a group of students on a New York Study tour. I had an open-door policy that year that enabled me to help students beyond the classroom with resumes, internship placement, and career advice. My passion for mentorship and education grew, and I started to feel a shift away from a career in apparel design. As my one-year contract was coming to an end, I had several paths to choose from. I could pursue a PhD to guarantee a tenure track and academic career. I could continue applying for apparel design jobs that I knew I didn’t want but would offer security. Or, at 25 years old with no “business” background, I could lean into open doors and listen to the internal pull to start my own business to support professionals and small businesses.
I met with a small business consultant to share my dreams with, fully prepared for her to tell me I was too young and should move on. However, she told me to get a business license and open a bank account.
Pursuing eloise design co was a huge risk, but I had a peace about my decision to take the leap. So, with my background and education in design and my love for teaching and coaching (and only $300), I decided to found eloise design co. I began offering career services to college students and professionals while also building my services in small business branding and design. Doors continued to open, and while shifting away from my past in the world of apparel design, eloise design co was where I saw my future.
As a college or graduate student, I couldn’t imagine that a degree in fashion design combined with research in consumer behavior would lead me to owning a branding business. So, this is a reminder to all of us: your skills can always be transferred, and your experiences will never go to waste – they will just be repackaged for a future opportunity.
In May of 2021, I was honored with Young Business Person of the Year in Auburn, AL, and knew I needed to be an influence on well-being in a chaotic world. As a solopreneur, I faced my fair share of burnout and struggle with work. I partnered with The Auburn Chamber of Commerce to train, write, and teach the first Women’s beingwell Retreat. It was taught seven times in the first six months, which made me realize I had another door opening. That door opened into starting my second business, beingwell mindset, with a friend and mentor, Will Joseph. Through beingwell, I’ve shared the lessons I learned the hard way with other professionals through countless workshops, retreats, and online content. This outlet has allowed me to create space to process the things we so easily suppress and serve in the educational and mentorship capacity I once dreamed of.
Now, I successfully help small business owners promote and brand their business alongside a talented team of women. I can see now how all of my experiences in apparel design and with Auburn University guided me here, and am thankful for the opportunity to pursue my passions.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
My career journey has neither been smooth nor straight! While I wouldn’t have minded some smoother seasons, every opportunity has provided me with impactful experiences that I have applied in my business and that have led me to where I am today. I am actually coming out of a year of great change – self-induced change. And with change comes bumps, lessons, and stress.
The first bump in the beginning of my business was refining our services and choosing the path for eloise design co. We built a successful foundation on career services and small business consulting, but I was drawn to follow more open doors and switch our focus to the small business side. So, I decided to take a risk and stop offering our career services in 2020. We were faced with our first big challenge: half of the business would need to be made up for in other ways. With hard work and honing in on the small business consulting side, we had the most profitable year yet (and in a pandemic!). Pivoting our focus was the first big risk I took for my business, but it was so rewarding.
Starting as a solopreneur in an industry I didn’t have a degree in presented its own challenges. As eloise design co focused on business branding, we had positive challenges in the form of new creative work and problem solving, but also personal challenges in the form of imposter syndrome. I was comfortable with career services and personal branding through my mentorship and teaching experiences. However, I felt I didn’t have any right to be in the marketing and advertising side that came from the land of business branding. I also had NO desire to be a marketing agency – I wanted to educate, train, consult, and inspire. So, the next challenge was leaning into the new opportunities before I felt ready and finding my own way within it. I started helping clients with their branding, marketing, communications, and strategy.
As the business grew and evolved, so did my burnout. I was unwell as a professional. Thankfully, I had a friend who patiently and persistently encouraged me to complete a program on time, stress, and burnout. It was the best decision I could have made for myself and my business. I learned the material, realized my warped workaholic mindsets, and began changing things in my life to be well. Then came to a risk-taking what I learned and sharing my story with other women in business. I rewrote the content and very vulnerably shared it with others. And it did well. Really well. And people kept hiring me to teach it to others. While burnout created several bumps in the road, it led to me learning more about myself and opened doors to help others navigate through their own seasons of burnout.
As 2022 approached, I was ready to finally make the first steps to the long-term dream – owning a business that was built on my true purpose: education. We slowly started firing ourselves from our bigger projects and retainers and began focusing on small business, project-based work, and teaching/training. It was not overnight. It was not smooth. But there was peace in the midst of the chaos.
When we started narrowing our approach and letting clients go, we were allowed to focus our energies so that we could begin writing and sharing content that helps others. We shifted the business model for eloise design co, and that allowed us to help grow businesses and brands well from the inside out. The realignment also allowed us to work behind the scenes to create the beingwell content, website, and podcast and launch the beingwell business in 2023.
While challenging, I’ve been able to navigate through a non-traditional and winding career path. I encourage others to lean into your passions and take advantage of open doors – you never know where it will lead you!
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
.eloise. design co is an education-based branding business with a passion to teach our clients HOW to build their businesses and brands well. We take all the pieces of a client’s brand and business and help them create an organized strategy and an elevated brand. Not only do we help clients define who they are through concise brand messaging and attractive brand design, but we teach our clients how to implement these elements strategically and successfully to build their business and communicate their offerings well.
With education being a pillar of our brand, we provide several education offerings through memberships, courses, retreats, free workshops, and more. We developed our BuildWell membership as a guide for small business owners, and just launched FreelanceWell to train and pair freelancers with small businesses who need their skill.
We teach the technical and strategic aspects of branding and marketing, but we also mentor the bandwidth and well-being of small business owners and freelancers. Our content is infused with the principals from our sister company, beingwell. beingwell develops content on topics such as time, stress, fear/anxiety, boundaries, and decision-making to be shared in retreats, workshops, and a podcast.
Our differentiator is our dedication to education. While other agencies often rely on ongoing retainer clients, we strive to equip our clients with the best tools, strategies, and understanding of their brand so they can better manage it on their own. We don’t gatekeep our knowledge – through workshops, programs, speaking engagements, podcasts, social content, and my mentorship, I am always educating others how to be successful in their business or professional life.
I’m most proud of the reputation that we have built as a brand. We receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from our clients and the community, which I attribute to our team’s intentional, kind attitude and the thought, care, and precision we put into our work. Our commitment to serving as intentional guides and educators to our clients and community has also established our brand as reliable resources that keeps client referrals flowing. We pride ourselves on being intentional, generous, joyful, creative, patient, and collaborative—all traits that we reinforce in all areas we conduct business.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you, and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
I have always told my small business clients to meet their target audience or customers in their need. During the season of Covid-19, this mentality was more important than ever, and offered a unique opportunity for the eloise design co team.
As a seasoned remote team, we buckled down to continue serving our clients who were struggling through the pandemic. We were fortunate to have an easier transition than most, which enabled us to focus on following our own advice of meeting our clients in their evolving needs. We created more systems and processes for our clients and our blog, created more robust social media content, and offered zoom workshops on working from home. Being in a stable remote working environment, I wanted to ensure that for other small businesses, so I offered free consulting sessions for small businesses who were struggling.
This season reinforced our mindset of meeting the need: anticipating what our clients and their customers need and adapting to meet that need. Our ability to adapt during the pandemic strengthened our team’s flexibility, grit, teamwork, and service, enabling us to better serve our clients.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.eloisedesignco.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eloisedesignco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eloisedesignco
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eloisedesignco/
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/eloisedesignco/
Image Credits
.eloise. design co.
