I was flipping through Instagram and came across a post that said something like this:
If you feel off, go back to doing what makes you you
I kinda hate posts with sayings like this but that one made me think. I’ve felt off for a while now, and after a year of craziness it’s really hard as an entrepreneur to feel like going after big things without feeling like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football.
We’ve been wanting to add some embroidery to our pieces for a while now and have also hated the process of ordering hats. We’re such a hands-on brand that sending work off to someone else just doesn’t feel right to us. We try to produce everything we can in our shop so we can keep tight controls on everything, and if we keep growing we’ll continue to add more to what we do in-house.
So with those two ideas in mind I decided to dive in head first into embroidery, knowing nothing about it, like I do with everything else. Just to bring you into my world a bit here’s what that looks like:
We start off by driving to Louisville from Indianapolis to check out a machine I saw on eBay, and I end up making a crazy lowball offer on two machines and the guy goes for it. We get both for half of what I expected to pay for one. So we set those up in our shop and I asked this amazing embroidery guru from a number I found on a forum to come out and help us. He drives from Cleveland and does a full service on the machines and also mentions a 6-head machine that he spotted in Atlanta. Since we don’t want to spend our entire days waiting on these machines I decided to YOLO-drive to Atlanta and grab that one too. Nine hours down, crash with a friend, pick up the machine the next morning and I’m back in Indianapolis that night. So just like that we’re equipped up and ready to make a ton of mistakes and eventually make stuff that we love (and hopefully you will too).
We’re so excited about the new products we can create and taking on something like this makes me feel like myself again (I guess that post was correct). Anyway, if you feel stuck just start doing your thing and you’ll pull out of it.
And that’s about as encouraging as I ever get.
Jared