Read an Excerpt
dream big
Finding the Courage to Follow your Dreams and Laugh at your Nightmares
By Lisa Hammond Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Copyright © 2004 Lisa Hammond
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-134-5
CHAPTER 1
creating a life of passion and purpose
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
–Beverly Sills
Now that I had given myself permission to dream and had a collage of clues scattered out before me, I had to bring my ideas into focus. I had a great road map and lots of signs that I was on the right path, but now I had to make a decision. What would my business be?
I had always dreamed of becoming a feminist philanthropist, someone who just gave money away to good causes, but since I hadn't yet amassed my own fortune and didn't have a rich aunt, let alone a rich aunt who was about to die and leave me all of her money, I decided I'd better go with plan B.
I knew I had to start a business that would somehow support or empower other women. But what? The answer seemed to arrive to me whole. Truly. One day I just woke up and said, "I'm going to start a catalog." I love to shop – via catalogs in my pajamas, not in a crowded mall. (My kids used to joke that without our UPS man we wouldn't have anything to wear and our house would be empty!) It was perfect. My catalog would focus on supporting women artists and other women-owned businesses, allowing me to combine my creative side with my passion for women's issues.
I had always felt strongly that we make a statement with our shopping dollars, whether we realize it or not. I go out of my way to patronize women-owned businesses. If I need shampoo, I go to Anita Roddick's Body Shop. If I need a book, I am willing to drive across town to the women's bookstore rather then buy it from the mass chains. Having a catalog whose products represented hundreds of other small businesses and individual artists would be a dream come true.
Figuring Out Where to Even Begin
Okay, so I knew I wanted to start a catalog. I didn't have a clue exactly how to go about it. Back to my blank book, which in reality was now a tall stack! I wouldn't be where I am today without spiral-bound blank books! Once again, I started jotting down ideas in a journal, mostly thoughts about what I wanted the catalog to be like rather than details about how to actually do it. I wrote down that I wanted each issue of the catalog to help a different charity. I wanted to let customers know about all the wonderful work being done by nonprofit organizations. I wanted to focus on women artists and celebrate their creativity. I wanted the catalog to be by, for, and about women. I wanted to create a community for women, and I wanted them to anticipate each issue with excitement. Anytime I had a thought or concept, I would jot it down in my blank journal, filling page after page with ideas and bursts of inspirations.
When you're at the planning stage, keep your journal handy and jot down every idea you have – not just for how to start your business but also what your business will look and feel like and the values you want it to reflect.
When my sister-in-law and friend Julie called to see if I wanted to take a road trip with her, I brought along my journal and we brainstormed together. By the end of the trip, the rest of the journal was full with juicy tidbits and dreams for a catalog. Actually, I really wanted Julie to start the catalog with me – in part because she is my dear friend and I wanted her to take her own turn and have her own income, and in part because I was scared and didn't want to do it alone. For a few months, we plugged along trying to pull this off with her in one state and me in another. In the end, it was clear I would have to be brave and go it alone. As Julie once told me, she was just the midwife, I was the mother. She held my hand during the birth of the business, but now this baby was mine to raise.
Starting a business is truly a lot like giving birth. First the idea gestates, then it is born, then come the colic and sleepless nights, then the terrible two's, the bumpy teenage years, and then hopefully someday your business matures and goes off to college.
No Turning Back Now
When I got back from the road trip, the seeds of this idea had so firmly taken hold that I almost forgot I already had a day job. At the time, I was still managing the office side of our construction company and my husband was managing the field side of the business. We were a two-person team, working out of a two-room home office. All I could think about was getting the catalog started and what I needed to do next. I told my husband, Jeff, what I was going to do.
Knowing me better than anyone else, Jeff didn't ask how I planned to do this or what I was thinking, he simply told me he thought it was a great idea and then got the heck out of my way. I'm not sure he would have been so enthusiastic if he had known that I would soon be dumping the running of the construction office in his lap!
It was only a matter of days into the catalog business when I realized I couldn't do both jobs; there just weren't enough hours in the day – or night. My brain was in overdrive with lists, my heart was overflowing with joy at the prospect of really making a difference, and my body was oozing adrenaline. I would spring out of bed at 5:00 A.M. (bear in mind, I am not a morning person) and run down the hall to my home office to jot down my latest idea. After a twenty-plus-hour day, I would climb back in bed at 2:00 A.M. and start the whole thing over again.
The second week, I went into my office, boxed up everything construction related, and took it down the hall to Jeff's office. He discovered the boxes on his floor when he got home later that day. Without skipping a beat, he unpacked the boxes and put the files in his filing cabinet and started where I left off.
After a few days, Jeff popped his head into my office to ask a question about one of the projects I had just dumped into his lap. I was so completely immersed in the catalog and looking forward that I couldn't get my brain to go back. I said with a sigh, "I didn't know how to do that either when I started managing the office. Nobody showed me; I just figured it out, and I am sure you will, too."
He let out his own sigh and went back to his office. Jeff knew I was a woman on a mission and there was no going back. Once I start something, it is full steam ahead. Amazingly, he never once complained about his newly doubled workload.
Suffice it to say that I'm aware not every husband would be as supportive as Jeff. I'm very blessed indeed.
A Business Plan? What's That?
With Jeff taking on my construction office work, I was able to fully focus on the tasks at hand and the work that was piling up on my desk. I was amazed to discover how one question just led to a dozen others. Once I thought I had one piece of the puzzle figured out, I would discover an entirely new area of the mail-order business I hadn't even thought of yet.
This stream of inquiries continued to guide me down the river of cataloging. Sometimes this river was filled with rapids, sometimes gurgling whitewater, and some-times a full-on waterfall – just when I least expected to be going over the edge of a cliff.
The truth is when I started down this road, I didn't have the foggiest idea how to launch a catalog. I simply knew I would burst open at the seams if I didn't create work that was meaningful to me. When the idea of a mail-order catalog finally gelled, I jumped.
I would love to say I spent months mapping out the per-fect business plan. The truth is my goals were very clear, but my business plan wasn't even on a scratch piece of paper when I decided to start Femail Creations. I wasn't even sure what exactly a business plan was.
You don't have to know what you are doing to start to do it!
Getting Started
I began by going through my own home and picking out items that meant something to me – everything from a favorite T-shirt to a pair of earrings to a book, sculpture, or piece of art given to me by a friend. Then I set out to track down the artist behind it. I became a regular super-sleuth, and my collection continued to grow. Pretty soon, I could find an artist anywhere. And the network just continued to grow. One artist would tell me about another who made some wonderful something that would be perfect for the catalog. This phone chain greatly added to the diversity of merchandise offered, even in that first catalog.
Amazingly enough, I didn't receive a single "no" from any of the artists I called. Every artist and vendor I contacted was excited about jumping on board. That fact alone kept my spirits high and let me know that women were hungry for something just like this.
Naming the Baby
Now if only I could figure out a name for my baby. Back to the journal for inspiration. I had several ideas, and I continually bounced them off family and friends to get their reaction. One night while I was making dinner it came to me: Femail Creations. I said it out loud and instantly loved the words. Females in the mail! I immediately picked up the phone to call Julie. She loved it, as did everyone else. That night Femail Creations started taking on a life of her own.
My Copy Writing "Gimmick" – Not!
Now the catalog had a name, it had a mission, and it had merchandise. It seemed logical that the next step would be to start writing the descriptions for the items I was going to sell. I could barely type, and I certainly hadn't done any professional copy writing before. But I did know how to talk, so I decided to just write as if we were having a conversation. I talked and Julie typed and together we ad-libbed our way through, while Jeff served us up margaritas. That's how the copy for the first catalog was written.
I still write the catalog today in that same informal and personal way. I just write down a little something about each product and artist as if I were telling it to an old friend. I'm not the Kathy Lee of cataloging, but I do mention my family and my dog, Zoë, from time to time. If my son happens to walk in and say something about a product while I'm writing copy, chances are it will end up in the catalog, too. If my sister is with me when I find a new product, or if it's 3:00 A.M. and I'm still up scrambling to make a production deadline, I'll probably mention that in the copy, too.
I once went to press with text for one item that basically said, "It's really, really late and I am out of witty adjectives. You are just going to have to trust me on this one and buy it to see for yourself how great this really is." The printer was so surprised by that sentence that she called to see if I'd left in the "dummy copy" (that's what we call the text that is used to fill the proper amount of space until final copy is written), but nope, I told her to roll the presses, that was the correct copy. This honest, first-person style and tell-it-like-it-is prose has actually become part of our brand. But it still comes from the heart.
I have written catalog copy just about everywhere. It is one of my jobs that I just have to squeeze in where I can. I have been known to pull out my laptop at my son's tennis matches, in the car (as a passenger, not a driver!), on many airplanes, and in hotel rooms all across the country.
Years into the business, I attended a catalog conference, and to my utter amazement, my copy was used as an example for creative branding. They thought I was a genius to come up with such a great "gimmick" for the copy. Little did they know my writing style came out of my ignorance about how copy should be written.
"Branding"
From the night the name came to me I was determined to have a very distinct logo for Femail Creations. I didn't have anything specific in mind, but I knew it had to be original. Since I can't even draw a stick figure, I knew I wouldn't be the one to come up with it, so I called a local artist who had done a unique project for me years before. Since she hadn't found my last request strange – to have prose from one of my favorite books painted on my family room wall – I knew she had the creative mindset I was looking for.
I gave her the name and brainstormed with her a little bit, and in a matter of days, she came back with this beautiful wild woman, with long flowing curly hair and a passionate attitude, dancing in celebration of the creative souls of women. I loved it instantly.
Several months later, I was having lunch with this same artist, and while driving home I told her again how much I loved the logo and how everyone commented on her wild curly hair. She turned to me in the car with this weird look on her face. She said, "Her curly hair? That's your curly hair! Of course I based your logo on you." I was stunned. How could I have been looking at this logo for months and not known that I was the inspiration for it? I think the only person more shocked than I was, was the artist. She couldn't believe I hadn't realized it.
The fact is when we first met I did indeed have long curly hair. But starting a business can literally make you pull your hair out. Ha! So I had cut off my locks in favor of a shorter, faster-drying style. I guess having short hair and being worn out from working so many hours had blinded me to the resemblance. Discovering that I was the inspiration for the logo gave me something to laugh about and a reminder not to lose touch with that part of myself.
Learning the Production Ropes
Once I had gathered up what, in my inexperience, I deemed to be enough merchandise to fill a catalog, I decided the next thing to do would be to find a photographer. Almost immediately, new words like stylist and props started coming up, but there wasn't any money in the budget for that, so it was wing-it time once again.
One foot in front of the other, I just groped my way along. Of course, there were a few jobs I couldn't handle myself. For starters, the photographer asked me questions about color separations and design. I had no idea why colors need to be separated, but I knew I'd better find someone who did. Then, the color separator asked me who would be doing the graphic design and layout for the catalog. In those days, I didn't know Quark from Cuisinart. In fact, I was a techno peasant who had only owned a computer for about a year or two and was still just using it as a glorified typewriter.
Layout. I needed to do the layout. I found some poster board lying around the house, no doubt left over from one of the kid's school projects, and cut and pasted the photos onto it. I began by deciding what would go on which page and then just glued the images to the poster board. I later learned this was called pagination – and it certainly wasn't done with poster board and Elmer's glue! But my homegrown technique got me through that phase of the first catalog, and in fact many more to come.
The color separator referred me to a graphic artist and I gave her my makeshift poster-board layouts so she could start putting them in the computer in the proper file format and prepare them for the printer. The artist who designed the logo stepped in and helped me with sketches for what I was calling our storyboards. People were just so generous and just guided me along. Seeing those first color proofs of the catalog was beyond exciting and made the project start to seem real.
I plugged along, continuing to pick up knowledge about the mail-order business as I went. After spending weeks researching order-entry software, I decided to purchase Mail Order Manager, or MOM, as we called her, to process the orders. MOM became the software for all of the functions of the catalog.
Finding Office Space
I was still running things from my kitchen table at this point, but it was clear I couldn't continue doing that for long. Jeff and I decided it made the most sense to find office space we could share and at long last get the construction company out of our house. So we found a space that seemed plenty big and was ready for immediate occupancy – and that was key, since we wanted to move in as soon as possible.
My to-do list seemed never ending. There were business licenses to get, bank accounts to open, mail permits to acquire, merchant services to establish, meetings with my accountant to make sure I was doing my paperwork properly for tax purposes, trademarks to register, and a million other things I didn't even know I was supposed to be doing but just learned about as I went. I was overwhelmed by all I had to do, and all I didn't know. Every day brought a dozen more things to add to my list. I was starting to understand the meaning of panic in a way I never had before.
I finally discovered that when I was feeling truly overwhelmed, relief could be found by finding at least one project on my list that could be completed in a relatively short amount of time. It might not even be the most important item on my list, but the sense of accomplish-ment made it worth doing first. Getting to cross even one thing off the list made a difference.
Yard by yard, life really is hard; inch by inch, life can be a cinch.
When it came time to place purchase orders for the initial inventory, I had a bit of a panic attack. How was I supposed to know how many of each item we would sell? We certainly didn't have any money to waste, and I felt a lot of pressure to get this part right. It seemed like I was just throwing darts trying to determine how much product to order. It definitely felt more like a guessing game than an educated guess. Because this was the first catalog, I didn't have any historical data to guide me, and I had no idea how to forecast which items would be the best sellers and which ones would tank. (I know, I know. If I had known, none of them would have tanked, right?)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from dream big by Lisa Hammond. Copyright © 2004 Lisa Hammond. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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