1. What is your business & what product or service do you specialize in? My boyfriend Dave and I started a sign making business together, called “Signed With Love Shop”. We make custom signs with any size, color or word/phrase combination. Personally I love a good dark stain with white calligraphy font on it. So rustic & classy!

2. How & when did you start your business? I started making things for my sister’s wedding this past summer. Her wedding was in October so, from Jul-Oct my house was filled with wedding décor (and it wasn’t even my wedding)! I started with an unplugged ceremony sign, making her table number cards & labeled just about everything. If something was written on, it was done by me. During and after the wedding, people wouldn’t stop complimenting me on my handwriting and work. Shortly after, friends and family had begun asking me to make things here & there.. Continuing to request that I open an Etsy shop – We officially opened shop on November 7th!

3. What is your WHY? Not just the practical reason for starting your own business but what drives you to keep going? Simply that we both love the process. Together we make an extremely good team. He’s the background guy and does all of the hard things that I could never do.. the cutting, priming, sanding, staining. I’m the one who writes whatever word or quote you’re looking for. We both genuinely love crafting, so it’s never difficult to find motivation & It’s so relaxing.

4. Tell us a little bit about your family dynamic? I’ve always been a family girl. Both of my parents come from larger families and I have two sisters. Dave and I have become each other’s family & we adopted a puppy in March 2015. For right now, it’s just the three of us. We live in our own little world and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

5. How do you balance work & family life? Balancing work and life can get pretty overwhelming at times. I’m a full time nanny for 3 kids under the age of 2.5 years old. Dave & I work fairly opposite schedules (though it could be worse). I’m home at 5 and he’s home by 9:30PM. Weekends are our thing though. I’m a planner and I stress out when I don’t know what’s going on in my life… So I owe a lot to a simple calendar. We love our “lazy days” and our lazy days usually consist of the dog park with our 85lb “puppy” and then coming home to work on the signs.

6. What is the most rewarding part about owning your own business? I would say the most rewarding thing about owning our own business is the true compliments that come with it. Nothing is better than knowing your work is in somebody’s home as their décor. They CHOSE to support you and your work. Nobody HAS to buy our signs. Nobody HAS to tell us that we’ll be successful.. but hearing it makes my heart happy.

7. What is the most challenging part of owning your own business? The most challenging thing about owning our own business I would say, is determining cost / pricing. Before we started, I talked to many of my friends who own Etsy shops but none of them make signs. Sizing, time and materials change the cost of a sign very quickly. It’s very difficult.. You feel like you don’t want to be too cheap or too expensive because you’ll never make enough money or nobody will take you seriously. Finding that happy-medium has been difficult… but we’re working on it and so far, we’ve revived nothing but amazing compliments.

8. What is one way you give back or support fellow moms or small business owners? Our way to give back to small businesses is to simply support them. We share their links, business pages and buy from them… it’s truly that easy. I appreciate hard work when I see it.

9. How do we as consumers impact your family when we support your small business? People can impact our little family pretty easily just supporting us. Enter in our giveaways, share our Etsy & Facebook pages, tell your friends & family about us… It means the world to us to have the support.

10. What has been the best compliment, review or piece of feedback received from a client or customer? {Yes, we want you to toot your own horn!} The compliments we’ve received are very much alike. “Your handwriting it’s beautiful, “how do you do this?”, “You two are such a great team.” If I had to pick a favorite, I would say when one of our customers picked up her sign, she was so in love with it that she put in another order only hours later. Without saying a word, that was the best compliment ever.