The Boss of You

I first came across Tressa Brotsky’s gor­geous organic soft toys and goods for wee ones at the Moss Street Mar­ket in Vic­to­ria BC this sum­mer. My mom wanted to pick up a gift for her acupunc­tur­ist, who was expect­ing and I was happy to tag along to one of my favourite com­mu­nity mar­kets. I was imme­di­ately taken with Tressa’s gor­geous wares and her eye for design, detail and an ele­gant sim­plic­ity in style. That’s a heck of a lot of praise to heap on a seem­ingly hum­ble set of organic cot­ton burp cloths and such, but if you take a look I think you’ll agree they are the loveli­est burp cloths you can find.

Since then I’ve admired both Tressa’s lovely goods and, as I started fol­low­ing her blog and learn­ing more about her, I had a hunch that she’d be a great resource for me to turn to for wis­dom around my pend­ing moth­er­hood and entre­pre­neur bal­anc­ing act. I recently had a lovely phone call with her dur­ing which we talked about sell­ing goods online, build­ing a busi­ness, bal­anc­ing moth­er­hood and run­ning a small busi­ness and all kinds of other good stuff which I’m excited to share with you here.

Tressa’s describes her­self as always hav­ing been some­one who was mak­ing stuff. In uni­ver­sity, at UVic, she was sculpt­ing, paint­ing, and from how she tells it gen­er­ally liv­ing in her stu­dio.  Even­tu­ally her eye for cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful things met her desire to find qual­ity organic prod­ucts to use with her young daugh­ter and she started mak­ing her own receiv­ing blan­kets, cloths and toys. Dress Me Up was born. She began the busi­ness by sell­ing at the Moss Street Mar­ket (the same mar­ket I first found her at), and even­tu­ally took her stuff online through other retail­ers and then with an Etsy store and now her own Shopify site.

I often have con­ver­sa­tions with prod­uct pro­duc­ers (and fash­ion design­ers, jew­elry design­ers etc) about whether or not they should con­tinue to have an Etsy site (or start an Etsy site), if they are sell­ing their wares through their own site online. Many folks seem to feel like the Etsy pres­ence will some­how cheapen, or lessen their main sales chan­nel through their own web­site. Tressa’s expe­ri­ence mir­rors my thoughts on the mat­ter exactly. She’s expe­ri­enced an incred­i­ble level of sup­port, pro­mo­tion and traf­fic through her Etsy site that would not have come to her via a stand alone site and it has con­vinced her to keep a shop up there. Some of her best PR hits — like being found by Celebrity Baby Blog, which even­tu­ally led to great cov­er­age and all kinds of fur­ther spin-off cov­er­age in major pub­li­ca­tions and some long stand­ing rela­tion­ships with retail­ers — have come through peo­ple search­ing through Etsy for prod­ucts to include in spreads/reviews. Add that to the active and sup­port­ive com­mu­nity around Etsy and she’s really happy to keep her store going there. One of the other ways she uses her Etsy store in a dif­fer­ent way from her main Shopify site, is to add some one-off or more flex­i­ble prod­ucts that aren’t nec­es­sar­ily a part of her main line. For exam­ple this year she’s mak­ing some gor­geous hol­i­day stock­ings from vin­tage wool, which she’ll be sell­ing through her Etsy site. She also uses the two stores to offer her goods in two dif­fer­ent cur­ren­cies — her main site is in Cana­dian dol­lars while the Etsy site is in US. Another use that Tressa has very wisely put Etsy to, is for research­ing what other prod­ucts sim­i­lar to hers are in the mar­ket. She is a smart cookie.

As for wis­dom to share around bal­anc­ing moth­er­hood and a thriv­ing busi­ness, she told me she wishes she had hired sup­port ear­lier. This is a com­mon story for many small busi­ness peo­ple — Lau­ren and me included — par­tic­u­larly those of us with an eye for detail and a bit of a pho­bia of risk. She’s started bring­ing in other mom’s, who help with the pro­duc­tion and sewing of her prod­ucts to assist her and has some­one else who helps with admin and pack­ag­ing of orders. She’s found that over­all she’s had to learn to get more com­fort­able with risk on dif­fer­ent lev­els from being respon­si­ble for pay­ing other peo­ple, to being will­ing to invest money into the busi­ness to help it grow. At this point, now that her busi­ness is grow­ing and enjoy­ing suc­cess, she has to try to not only bal­ance being the kind of mom she wants to be with run­ning the busi­ness, but also finds she needs to try to bal­ance the every­day minu­tia of run­ning the busi­ness and tak­ing care of the admin­is­tra­tive end, with find­ing time to be cre­ative and work on new prod­uct designs. Over­all, she shared with me, the biggest chal­lenge has been pick­ing up and learn­ing the skills required to run a suc­cess­ful organic soft goods busi­ness along the way, as she really didn’t start out think­ing about build­ing a busi­ness per se. That learn­ing curve is cer­tainly a lot of entre­pre­neurs strug­gle with try­ing to stay ahead of.

You can find Tressa’s gore­geous wares in her stores and from the fol­low­ing fine retailers:

• Dress Me Up
• Dress Me Up on Etsy
• Fawn & Forest
• And you can fol­low her on Twit­ter here