Today we’d like to introduce you to Lindsay Thomas.
Hi Lindsay, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I have worn many hats – mortgage broker, caterer, fundraiser, advertising sales rep… and probably a few I’m forgetting. When I became a mother, I felt a strong pull towards more time at home. When my first child was born I was still working full time in a fairly demanding job.
The stress and travel requirements began to feel unmanageable, and when I became pregnant with my second child a couple of years later, I knew I needed to make a lifestyle change (perhaps while pumping breasts in the office bathroom multiple times per day, while staring into the mirror wondering how I got here). We were not in a position for me to leave the workforce altogether, so I found part-time work here in Savannah.
Although that got me closer to where I needed to be in terms of flexibility and time with my children, it still was not quite ideal (most part-time jobs don’t end when your official work hours do, and juggling that level of availability and productivity during family time with a toddler is not a recipe for success). I began to realize that the needs I had would likely only be met through self-employment.
At the time, I was pretty proficient at sewing – particularly pillows, since I had a preoccupation with interiors. So I decided to begin my own pillow business where I would sew and sell decorative pillows. This announcement came as a surprise to my, understandably nervous, banker-husband. I’m sure my whimsical, creative nature was charming when I had a real desk job, but this was another ball game!
This was not the stability that we were used to. To his credit, he shakily agreed to try out this new path to the “happy wife” trope. A local boutique, Number Four Eleven (now Courtland & Co.), graciously purchased most of the pillows I approached them with, and in doing so seeded some growth for my pillow business. My services then extended to local interior designers, and eventually a corporate connection that solidified it as a stable and thriving company.
After a year I had so much demand from the corporate client, that I had to eliminate the remaining pillow business, and thus my creative outlet (which had been a hugely fulfilling aspect of my business). After several months, I came across a tutorial on Pinterest about how to make an envelope-style clutch purse using hot glue and cardboard. I had a big plastic bin full of remnants from the various beautiful (and expensive!) fabrics I’d been using to make decorative pillows for the past year or two, so I decided to use one of them for this experimental cardboard clutch.
The result was… exactly what you might think it was. It was a sad little fabric clutch reinforced with cardboard, that I would not be caught dead with in public. However, it introduced me to the basic construction of a clutch purse and fed my need for a creative outlet. I began the process of finding construction materials that would yield a legitimate clutch purse where I could use the textiles I was so in love with but with the firm structure of a typical leather clutch.
After many months of trial and error, I had my first prototype – a green silk clutch purse. I decided to search eBay for vintage brooches that I could affix to the front. I posted a photo of my first clutch to my Instagram page and received a very positive response. The creative outlet, combined with the ego-stroking of public approval, created a sartorial monster! Suddenly all I could do was think about which fabrics would look amazing as a clutch.
Which vintage bauble style would dazzle as an accent? How I could get a slightly stiffer structure from this interfacing, or that foam? I was a woman obsessed! And with each iteration, I gained more confidence and more experience. Eventually, I found myself receiving offers to purchase the clutches I was posting on Instagram, and so decided to make it an official side hustle.
We are now roughly 5 years down the road. I have hired two of my best friends – one now serves as CEO, the other COO. They are excellent at all aspects of this business that I am not. They compensate for my shortcomings in beautiful ways, and the ability for me to focus on my “zone of genius”, creativity, while they proficiently grow our company through organizational and strategic focus, is yielding thrilling results.
It has truly humbled and astounded me to watch what can happen when you allow yourself to focus on what you’re good at, and delegate the rest to people who are smarter than you are. We’ve expanded our company’s offerings from just clutch purses to belt sets, and now bracelets. Though the company consists of three, we subcontract out our sewing to a team of 4 local seamstresses and have subcontracted to website design, bookkeeping, publicity, and more.
We have expanded from a little additional room off of my bedroom into a beautiful multi-room office space 3 minutes from our neighborhood (we are all three neighbors). We have a thriving online business and a robust wholesale arm that has our products in around 100 boutiques nationwide. I have surrounded myself with exceptional women who continue to help me make this company grow while maintaining the fun and excitement I started with. Pinch me!!!!!!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
As expected, NO! I’ve heard many founders say this, and I’m no exception – if someone had sat me down when I first began this and laid out each step of the journey to where we are now, I would have given up right then and there. I think not knowing what you are doing can be one of the biggest advantages to founders.
Before hiring help, I was juggling making pillows for my corporate client and trying to grow the new clutch business. Plus I am a mom of young children and a wife. Consequently, I found myself in my sewing room until the wee hours of the morning trying to finish pillow projects or answer emails. I was burning the candle at both ends and surely not showing up for my family in the way that I should have been. Even though I was physically present, I was spending a LOT of time in my sewing room.
When I finally found a seamstress to help me with my pillows, it was like coming up for a desperately needed breath of air. I then sought out help with my clutches as well and began to understand how to build an effective product-based infrastructure. But the courage to take the chance on that kind of expense only came from a place of desperation.
For the first half of this journey, I didn’t understand my numbers or much of anything about the financial side of my business. I understood the basics of needing to make more money on my products than I was spending on them, but did not have that process down to a science by any means. The small factory I had hired to help with my bags graciously walked me through formulas for pricing, and strategies for tracking my expenses. Because of that, I was able to more effectively price my products and actually pay myself.
I have ADHD (just recently diagnosed), so I dealt with personal challenges of an overall lack of organization, a tenuous grasp of numbers, feelings of overwhelm, and procrastination to name JUST a few. So, for many years I felt a general lack of control. There are so many moving parts to a multi-faceted business like this and knowing that I did not fully have my arms around all parts of it was a stress that I know robbed me of some of the joy I could have been feeling. It created an imposter syndrome that I still struggle with all the time.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I design and sell clutch purses and belts. My clutch purses were born from a love of interior textiles and utilized them as a celebration of their artistic genius. We adorn them with vintage-inspired decorative hardware pieces, which we have transitioned into statement belt buckles, that pair with custom stretch belt bands.
It is my absolute passion to search for fabrics and other malleable textiles (such as grasscloth wallpaper or silk scarves) that speak to me, creatively. Upon discovering that I could make a clutch purse out of almost anything, my happiest place is conceptualizing new and exciting clutch iterations.
In addition to a creative bent towards design, I have also had a natural writing ability for much of my life. As I grew my clutch business, I would post photos of my creations (at that time they were generally one of a kind) on Instagram. One day I had used a particularly unusual wool fabric for a clutch, and when I looked at it, I couldn’t help but think of a humorous back story for it, as if it were a person.
So I decided to caption its photo with its hypothetical back story – a vintage store owner in Soho specializing in previously worn clothing of well-known rock groupies. She’s impossibly cool and dated a string of semi-famous rock front men before finally settling down with a hot hedge fund manager. There’s a little more to the story but you get the idea.
This story was met with great enthusiasm so I was inspired to begin writing these stories for most of the bags I posted – naming them “purse profiles”. There are many moms, there’s a cult member, an uptight horticulturist, a female drug lord, hippies, blue blood, realtors, and artists. The list is pretty long by now. The profiles have become a recognized part of our brand, and have a bit of a cult following. They’ve been such a fun creative outlet and an unexpected way to incorporate another creative skill of mine into my brand.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I think I’ve been blessed with just the right amount of innate risk-taking. I would not call myself a big risk-taker, but I’m definitely up for calculated risk. Starting this business was certainly risky, as I decided to leave the comfort and stability of employment with an established company in favor of striking out on my own, in an industry where I had no previous experience, and starting from scratch.
However, the inherent risk in this decision is mitigated in no small part by the fact that I had a spouse with a healthy income who could support our family for at least enough time for me to determine if I could find success. I can’t see myself taking this kind of risk without that kind of safety net.
I’ve met with risky decisions throughout this journey. First at the expense of utilizing an outside seamstress for the first time. I weighed the pros and cons and ultimately realized that doing all of the sewing myself was making me miserable, yielding too many sewing errors, and robbing me of the flexibility that had been the primary purpose for starting my own business in the first place. So this calculation made the risk ultimately worth taking.
Later on, I hired my first employee. I ran many numbers and realized that the potential benefit outweighed the potential failure. What I would gain in time, focus, and added brainpower *should* result in eventual revenue growth to cover the added expense. And that’s exactly what happened. Most recently we took the risk of adding a new product category to our offerings.
The initial expense was bigger than any other expense I had ever undertaken, and it was not certain that the product would be a hit. If not, we would lose most of that investment. However, we made sure that the worst-case scenario would not be catastrophic for us – in other words, if we only sold 15-20% of the inventory we had made, and did not recoup the remainder of the investment, could our business survive?
The answer was yes… barely. And, given that we had thought through the idea extensively, and done lots of market research (on our own – we didn’t have the budget for formal market research), we felt reasonably confident that we would at least sell half of the inventory we’d made (we felt pretty optimistic that we’d sell all of it, of course). Fortunately, it was the huge success we’d hoped it would be, and it has paid off in spades.
My view of risk-taking is that it’s necessary for growth. But I think it should be measured and considered. I like to think through the “what-if” scenarios very carefully so that I have an actionable plan if things don’t go the way I anticipate. This helps with pulling the trigger. It also helps me to determine if the risk is reasonable. If I do have actionable plans B and C in the event of failure, then I feel pretty confident that the risk is not too large to take on.
Pricing:
- Clutch Bags: $295 – $350
- Belt Buckles: $85 – $95
- Belt Bands: $35
- Bracelets: $85 – $95
Contact Info:
- Website: www.garlandbags.com
- Instagram: @garlandbags
Image Credits
Kelli Boyd Photography
