Last Friday my sister and I announced that we were closing T&J Designs, the clothing and jewelry line and ecommerce shop that we created over 7 years ago and put our heart and souls into. I had so many of you reach out through instagram DMs to share your stories of what you bought from us, your favorite items and so many kind notes of support. I appreciate them so much and we would never have gotten to where we are without all of our amazing customers and friends. I still remember the moment my family and I decided to start this business, and how exciting the day of our launch was.
Why we closed T&J Designs
A lot of you also wondered what had happened and why we decided to close the business. My sister wrote a really great post that summarized our journey from beginning to end. It truly has been an amazing ride, to starting our company with $5,000 to design our website and fly to China to start our jewelry collection. Getting on the Today show, that helped bring the company to the next level, to making over $1 million dollar in sales to creating our own clothing line to being accepted into 500 startups and traveling to Silicon Valley every week for 4 months. We’ve been through so much and now that I write it out, I almost can’t even believe it!
Head over to Jen’s post to read about our journey. I don’t want to repeat all the details here, but I did want to offer my perspective as my sister and I had differing circumstances at the end of our journey that helped us both know that it was the right choice for us to close down the business.
What it takes to run a fashion business
When I tell people that I own a clothing and jewelry line the first response is usually “Oh that must be so fun!” and it was indeed fun but the part that everyone thinks about, designing the clothing and jewelry was a small part of the business.
The rest of the time was spent marketing (social media, email newsletters, getting more subscribers, facebook ads, etc…) packing and shipping (we usually had a team of 4-5 people doing this), inventory management (which is a whole beast in itself), customer service – returns, exchanges, complaints, questions… (this takes up more time than you can imagine), shooting the products, updating/managing our website, managing our factories in China, and of course just all the general duties of owning your own business and managing a team of 10-12 people.
Within 2 years of starting our business, we began to wholesale our line which grew to around 200 accounts. Wholesale, in itself is a whole different business than the e-commerce side. We were doing tradeshows, had account reps and showrooms so we were basically running two huge businesses at once.
Basically we were doing all of this for 6+ years which meant we were all working 12-14 hours every single day. And don’t even get me started on holiday season where we worked around the clock from September/October until December. And oh yeah, in between all of this, I got pregnant and had my first baby and my sister had two babies!
The (non) balance of being a mom and entrepreneur
We were busier than ever, and looking back at it, I loved it. I loved that we were so busy and our company was able to grow so fast. My parents have been involved since day 1 and I loved being able to work together as a family. But when you own your own company, the hardest part is to stop working. I worked all the time and when I wasn’t working, I was thinking about the business and it just never left my mind. it took a toll on my health both physically and mentally. My husband saw how it wore me down, he encouraged me to take days off, he encouraged me to go to yoga and do the things that I loved and just get some “me time.” He saw me through some of my worst anxiety attacks and even now, even though I haven’t had one in years, he still checks in on me and my mental state just to make sure that I don’t reach that point again.
In between the business, my husband and my daughter, I wanted to make sure that everyone was taken care of and I just never made the time for myself. I never wanted the business to affect my daughter so I always gave her my full attention whenever she was with me. This meant giving up a lot of regular working hours and only working after she had gone to bed so I ended up working until 2-3am on most days and waking up early before she woke up.
But don’t get me wrong, it was not all like this. I never once regretted leaving my corporate job to start my own business. I was so much happier than I ever had been. I loved that I was able to control my schedule and allowed me the freedom to spend time with my daughter. I loved connecting with customers through social media and email. I loved seeing our designs come to life and see how our customers wore them. The rewards of owning your business are endless and I will always be an entrepreneur because of that.
And then came the question of baby #2
I had always hesitated about having a 2nd child but it slowly crept up on me as I watched my daughter grow, that I really wanted a sibling for her. I have 2 amazing siblings that I adore and I just couldn’t imagine her growing up without a brother or a sister. For 5 years, my business was my 2nd child, I gave it as much attention as much as I did my daughter and because of that, I always knew that it would be very hard for me to have a 2nd child, while still running T&J Designs. It really hit me at the end of 2016 that I just knew it was time to expand my family but I questioned how I was going to do that amidst everything else I had going on in my life.
As my sister mentioned in her post, 2017 was a tough year for us and it was definitely hard on me because I felt like I was on a timeline to be able to get pregnant and have my 2nd. My parents, sister and I knew that this was the year where something had to be done so we looked at our numbers, we looked at our 5 year plan and made a decision. We could have continued and created more products and both my sister and I had grown an instagram following that really helped with our business. But, knowing how much work we had all been doing and everything else that was going on in our personal lives, we realized what was realistic for all of us and it was time to slow down the business. For me, it was time for me to concentrate on my family and hopefully expand our little family! I was lucky in that I got pregnant very quickly and found out early 2018 that I was expecting our 2nd!
What’s next for T&J Designs
We will no longer be selling on our website but we will still have our wholesale open to a few select accounts. We also currently sell wholesale through Poshmark who has been an amazing partner for the past 5 years. Our inventory will be much smaller and my mom and dad will be running that business with the occasional help from me and my sister. My dad has been an entrepreneur all his life and he refuses to “retire” as he loves to work. Having a much smaller scale of T&J Designs is perfect for him and my mom where he is still able to work but not have to be at an office full time and allows him to play as much golf as he wants! 🙂
What’s next for me
I think most of you know that in 2018 I transitioned to be a full time blogger/content creator. I feel extremely lucky to have been able to transition into this new career. I will have another post soon with more details on my journey as I get a lot of questions about how I did this! My sister has done the same through her blog and instagram and I love that we can continue to share in the same journey together. Even though we don’t technically work together on the same business anymore, having her in the same industry has been immensely helpful.
Last year was so much change where we moved to a new house, had a baby and changed careers but I couldn’t have asked for anything better. I still own a business, it’s just a different kind of business but it has allowed me to stay at home with baby Edie just as I did with Layla. My husband gets to see a lot more of me and I truly love what I do. I get to work with brands that I never dreamed of working with and now that my daughter is more involved with my instagram, I basically get paid to spend time with my girls!
I never really saw this as the end of T&J designs as that business opened up so many doors and helped me learn so much that has brought me to this stage in life. I just see it as a continuation of what I was doing but just a different variation of it.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU
Thank you again for your support, whether you have been a blog reader since the beginning or followed me from T&J Designs or even are a new reader, I truly appreciate that you spend even a little bit of your time with me. It’s amazing the kind of friendships I’ve made through blogging and my business and I hope that I can continue connecting with you all for a long time! If you have any questions about starting your own business, growing your business, starting a blog or anything else, I’m always here to help! You can email me or reach out to me via DM on my instagram or facebook. One of my passions is helping other small business owners with running their business and it’s something that I hope that I can do more of in the future!
