www.startupnation.com

by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs

• Join - It's Free!
• Log in

My StartupNation

Doing Well by Doing Good: Jayne Ertel and Heidi Vance

 

Jayne and Heidi's Story: Jayne Ertel and Heidi Vance have been friends since college. They happened to end up working for the same downtown Chicago consulting firm. Then Jayne, a CPA and MBA, and Heidi, a lawyer, decided to start a company together to offer consulting to corporations on “administrative processes.”

But it wasn’t until the pair launched Team Blonde Jewelry, a hometown boutique, that they began to experience the fun of a retail business. They started the company as a hobby, making beaded jewelry themselves and selling it at “jewelry parties” they hosted in a second-story downtown warehouse space of about 1,200 square feet.

By last year, however, they were taking Team Blonde seriously enough to move to a first-floor storefront, part of a total of 2,400 square feet of space, and greatly expand their selection of merchandise. That’s also around the time when they began to specialize in the sales of goods that were made by women-owned companies, some of them located in the Third World, imbuing Team Blonde with a social consciousness that has become crucial to its brand identity.

Still, the move disrupted their sales and business momentum, Jayne says. But now that Team Blonde is all settled in its new digs, she expects 2006 revenues of about $400,000 compared with last year’s take of just $175,000.

“Team Blonde has ended up taking more and more of our time and nudging us away from our consulting business,” Jayne acknowledges. “But we love every minute of it.”

Jayne and Heidi's Key Move: Doing Well by Doing Good

Jayne and Heidi “aren’t bleeding-heart liberals,” Jayne insists. But they do have a heart for society’s less-empowered. “Children, animals and old people are on their own,” says Heidi.

And they make a special point of helping businesses owned by single women, like themselves, as often as they can. That’s one thing that drew Jayne and Heidi to their website designer, for example – who also happens to be very talented.

 “We see what we’re up against – we’re both single women, and we have two companies,” Jayne says. “We’re the ones on the front lines paying our health insurance; no one else is. So we understand how important it is to help other women business owners.”

So Team Blonde began specializing in selling “socially conscious” goods that are handmade by people who may need a hand up, and by women-owned businesses. And they added an “eco-friendly” component to the store’s merchandise mix, because Heidi had grown up with an environmental consciousness – her dad makes his own biodiesel fuel.

Heidi’s mother had introduced the pair to soaps and bath salts offered by The Enterprising Kitchen, a not-for-profit company headquartered in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, which now supplies Team Blonde. In addition, Jayne and Heidi began carrying zulugrass necklaces made by a Kenya-based company that employs rural tribeswomen to craft them.

Another vendor, Kits ‘N Kaboodle, employs mentally handicapped people in making herbal neck and eye pillows. Team Blonde also offers handbags made by Vy & Elle from recycled vinyl billboards.

“I thought if it was important to me, it might be important to others, too,” says Heidi. “If you as the owner love something, it comes through to your customers. And there is definitely a market of people who are looking for ways to spend their money on things that make a difference, however small.”

Overall, about 25% to 30% of Team Blonde’s merchandise now has what they define as “socially responsible” origins, up from practically nothing a couple of years ago. For the 2006 Christmas shopping season, Jayne says, she and her partner might push that number to 40%.

Heidi and Jayne feel a responsibility to perform due diligence and make sure that they’re helping enterprises that really are owned by women or are otherwise helping the disadvantaged. They attend trade shows and interview prospective vendors, research them on the internet, and even talk with competitors to make sure that Team Blonde is getting the straight story – before the store tells that same story to its customers.

But Team Blonde also helps its socially conscious vendors tell those stories through flyers and other collateral material that the store gives customers along with their merchandise. And sales associates are expected to learn the back stories behind the companies so they can tell customers about them.

“Customers are very interested, and sometimes they want copies of [the company stories] that they can give to people who are going to receive something as a gift,” Jayne says.

Heidi says their efforts to showcase merchandise with meaning “get people talking in the store. And we know they’re buying stuff not just because they like it – but because they’re drawn to our cause.”

Like Jayne and Heidi, more entrepreneurs are finding that they can do well – and good – simultaneously. It certainly adds another worthwhile motive to the pleasure of getting up and running your own company each day!

Jayne and Heidi's Bonus Insight

The owners of Team Blonde believe in entrepreneurial incrementalism. In other words – don’t bite off more than you can chew!

Their company began as just a jewelry-making hobby they shared with friends, and then they gradually took on more rental space  to help it grow. “We’d look at each other and say, ‘Do we really want to take this to the next level?” Jayne says.

“We’d seen another business on our street that went under. They had put every single drop of money into the place and made it a Cadillac before it needed to be. If you start out as a Yugo until people understand what you’re about, it’s a better way.”

Every entrepreneur, in fact, should make sure that their business plan fits their life plan – and their personality. There’s no particular valor in blowing out a company all at once anyway. Remember that fable about the tortoise and the hare!