On today's episode, we are joined by Meg Young. Meg is the founder and owner of Cailini Coastal, an e-commerce business that offers one-of-a kind coastal inspired accessories and home decor. Meg will provide advice on how to start an e-commerce business, even during a global pandemic! She'll discuss everything from sourcing to vendors to warehousing inventory in her garage to the help she received from the free government resources SCORE. She'll also describe the importance of personalized relationships with your customers. One of Meg's passions is purposeful giving, and she committed to donating 100% of profits for the first six months in business to support Family Promise, a national nonprofit that helps low income families and families experiencing homelessness achieve sustainable independence through a community based response.
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On The Madeline & Becca Podcast, we chat with leading women from a variety of industries about their career journeys and how they developed professional self-confidence.
Produced by Madeline and Becca
Episode #23: Launching an e-commerce business with Meg Young
Meg Young [00:00:00] I had this aha moment of wait a second, this stuff I actually know, like I actually know how to, you know through my PR and marketing experience, like a lot about email marketing and just sort of like the flow of the website and visually and esthetically what it should look like and promotions during seasons and of course, the whole PR side of it and how to work with influencers and then getting press and all of that. And that was really the moment where I thought this could be the perfect blend for me because it's in the design realm. It's something that I enjoy. But it also actually utilizes the skill set that I have. And I felt like that's what I was missing.
Madeline & Becca [00:00:50] Welcome to The Madeline and Becca Podcast, the mission of our podcast is simple, to inspire professional self-confidence in women everywhere. I'm Madeline. And I'm Becca. On our podcast, you will hear stories from real world influencers, women who have experienced tremendous success in their careers by building self-confidence. Thanks for joining us.
Becca [00:01:30] Meg Young began her career in the PR industry, spending 13 years on the agency side of the business in New York City before moving to L.A. and working in-house for several beauty brands. She worked as the first PR director at Jouer cosmetics and then at Kate Somerville. Having always had an entrepreneurial mindset, Meg decided to found her own PR consultancy business. Although her business was thriving, she felt like there was something missing for her professionally. After a lot of market research, brainstorming and discernment about her career, Meg launched Cailini Coastal, an e-commerce business that offers one-of-a kind coastal inspired accessories and home decor. On today's episode, Meg will provide advice on how to start an e-commerce business, even during a global pandemic! She'll discuss everything from sourcing to vendors to warehousing inventory in her garage to the help she received from the free government resources SCORE. She'll also describe the importance of personalized relationships with your customers. One of Meg's passions is purposeful giving, and she committed to donating 100% of profits for the first six months in business to support Family Promise, a national nonprofit that helps low income families and families experiencing homelessness achieve sustainable independence through a community based response. Here's Madeline.
Madeline [00:03:00] Tell us, how did you, you know you've got a lot of good business and a stable career, so how did you make the decision then to leave the business and take a leap into a completely different, different field?
Meg Young [00:03:15] Yeah, so I've always been a pretty intuitive person and very connected to my gut and those feelings in everything in life. And I feel like when I look at history and these strong gut feelings I've had on things, it's always right. I don't always listen to it. And I just kept having this gut feeling of, you know, I'm 13 years into this career. It's been an amazing career. But I've had this gut feeling for probably five years that there's something else. I thought it was becoming an entrepreneur and having my own business. I'm now doing that. And it's this amazing career. And I was in this place where my husband was saying to me, you need to hire, you need to scale this. You should get an office space. You should hire a team. You certainly have the demand, all of these amazing positive things. But I didn't want to do that. It was sort of like, you know what, I don't want to grow this bigger. I'm happy having it just me. I don't want a big PR agency. That wasn't what I was looking for. And that to me was red flags everywhere. And it wasn't that I don't want it to be bigger because I don't want to have a team and have that sort of, have that whole undertaking of like having a staff and having office space. It was like, I don't want that business. And that to me was the sign of then why am I doing this? And I kept getting fantastic clients, really exciting brands. And sometimes, like, I beat out big agency in New York for them. It was exciting. And I was always happy and proud. But there was this level of like, I should be more excited. And it was a bit like, great, this will be a wonderful brand to have. And again, that to me was a red flag. Like, there's a disconnect here. And honestly, I think, and I think a lot of people feel this way seven, ten plus years into their career. It's like you started this career. I went to school, I studied public communications, essentially PR. I got my first internship working in PR, started working at a PR agency at twenty-one. And if we're so different now. Right? And now I'm thirty-five and life just changes you and you grow and your interests change and you have kids and so many things changed and I felt like what once really excited me was no longer as exciting and I just was lacking some of the passion that I once had for what I was doing. That was a big thing. The other thing for me was, there was something that wasn't fulfilling me on a deeper level, you know, personally, I have always been pretty philanthropic. My parents raised my brother and I just doing a lot of charity work and the importance of giving back to others and using the gifts you have to help those who may not have the same gifts. And I had done a lot of that when I was growing up, through college, in New York. I mentored through Big Brothers, Big Sisters while I was in New York, which is an incredible organization. And once I moved to L.A., I stopped doing quite as much work. And it wasn't because I lost the desire to do it. Sort of life became chaotic once I had kids and work got busier. And once I had bigger roles and it became a bit of, I was just donating to these organizations, which is still a wonderful thing to do. I think for me personally, I love the human connection. And that's why I loved working with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, because I had a mentee and I had the same lovely mentee for five years and I could watch her grow. I could watch the direct impact that I had on her and her life. And I felt like I was working in this industry, in this beauty industry, that while I worked for some absolutely incredible role models and people overall, the industry values were a little bit different than my own. I felt like I wasn't necessarily doing anything through my work that was making a really positive impact. And we would often say, but, you know, making somebody feel beautiful helps their self-confidence. And yes, it does, for sure. And absolutely with skincare, if somebody has tremendous acne and we clear their skin, which I saw when I was working at Kate Somerville, that absolutely is a really positive impact. And I can see why the estheticians felt that way about their work they were doing. As the publicist for the brand, it was a little bit more of a disconnect of like what am I personally doing that's impacting people in a positive way? So, I knew that I wanted to do something else. I had no clue what that was, which was the issue for many years. And, I also knew that aside from doing something that personally brought me joy from like a place of passion, I wanted to do something that did some good. So, I had these very general ideas and it was a bit of like this, well great, what the heck do I do with this? And it really was many years of kind of thinking about it, but it was one very intense year of coming up with this, I now know that this is not the right path for me. I want to actually change lanes. I have no idea how to do that. I have no idea what I want to do. But I know I need to do this, and I've got to figure this out. So, I, like, searched for career coaches. I did tons of Google searches. You know, when you type in Google something, you're feeling and its sort of like a hodgepodge of words or like "I don't like my career anymore and I want to change careers, but I don't know what to do." You know like, give me the answer! Like Google pops up with this like "Here's what you do, step one Meg." Really at this level of truly, I mean I want to be totally honest, like pure cluelessness. And so, I, I took this year and I say this because I know that many women, many people wonder this. There are probably you know some listeners who are like, I feel the same way. So, I say this as somebody who is like not the, I don't have the answer how to get there. But I've shared this advice with some of my friends who are also at similar places in their career. I would say first what I did was, I was like, OK, so what are the things that bring me personal joy? What are the things I'm interested in? And some of this I think I did find through Google searches, like find things you love. And there were some things that I had to just like, you know, knock off the list because you're like, well, there's no way I'm making any money by, you know, whatever it is like singing, like I'm not a singer. I may enjoy singing around my house, but, you know, I'm not I'm not the next Adele for sure. But then there were some, I sort of like narrowed it down to things that really interest me. And home decor, interior design was one of those things. And so, that was the one that kind of sticked out the most of, OK, this is something that really interests me. And maybe I go to design school, maybe I become an interior designer. That could be, that sort of feels like a path I could put myself on. So, I looked into becoming an interior designer and I did all the research you should do before you sort of change lanes. And so, I connected with interior designers through mutual friends. I spoke to a handful of them. I researched design schools. What does that cost? What is the timeline? Do I need to go to design school? I thought, do I start my own business? Seems like some people are starting their own business without proper experience. Or do I apprentice for someone? And while I was going through the research, I found this podcast that, see podcasts are amazing in so many ways! That was actually dedicated to interior design and it was more speaking to designers about their business. And I was a little bit unsure at this point when I discovered this podcast whether or not interior design was the right step for me. I thought, well, I like overall the home and making it feel like your own and the design process. But, after speaking with some designers, I'm not sure that, that's one-hundred percent what I want to do. And so, I found this podcast and there were several designers that came on the podcast and they talked about how now with e-commerce being as huge as it is, these designers used to make some of their actually significant amount of their income through these one of a kind finds that were for the trade only. But as life has changed in recent years, all of these brands offer direct to consumer, and no longer, for example, say, a Serena and Lily, which may have been it wasn't. But hypothetically, a decade ago was a to the trade only brand now sells direct to consumer because these brands realized we can make a lot more money if we have a wider customer base. So, because designers are sort of navigating some of the changes in the industry, one of the things that they started doing were starting their own online e-commerce shops. And I thought, oh, that's so interesting and makes complete sense. So, I went online, I checked out some of these shops and I loved what I saw. I loved they were so uniquely curated, just things you wouldn't find at a mainstream e-commerce store or a household name. And it felt very much like a designer picked these items out. And I thought, oh, this is so interesting. As a customer myself, I personally love shopping local boutiques and flea markets and antique stores because I, I personally really enjoy those unique finds and so much of what I have in my home is something that you can't really find at a mainstream store. And, you know, I realized that when I had kids and I wasn't out browsing boutiques on the weekends like I once was or antiquing, there really wasn't anything online that was offering this. And when I looked through these designer's websites, I saw a lot of beautifully curated products, but they were small sites. They didn't have a lot to offer. It was maybe you know; you'd go to their lighting page and they'd have three or four lights. So, it was it was a very limited selection. And then looking at it sort of with my PR marketing eye, I saw a lot of opportunity and I even ordered some things from these sites, things that I loved. And I thought, you know what, their customer service is really slow. It takes like three days to hear back from them or, you know, their website could have some design improvements. Like I was almost looking at it critically, not in a way to criticize them, but just more of like, oh, I would do this. And if they did this, that would really help. If they promoted this or they should work with influencers. And as I was doing that, it was sort of like I was, wanted to give them all this feedback of how I thought they could enhance their websites. And these designers have these phenomenal design businesses. So, of course, like this is sort of an afterthought, like an extra revenue stream for them. And a little bit that's when I had this aha moment of wait a second, this stuff I actually know like I actually know how to through my PR and marketing experience, like a lot about email marketing and just sort of like the flow of the website and visually and esthetically what it should look like and promotions during seasons and of course the whole PR side of it and how to work with influencers and then getting press and all of that. And that was really the moment where I thought this could be the perfect blend for me because it's in the design realm. It's something that I enjoy. But it also actually utilizes the skill set that I have. And I felt like that's what I was missing when I was talking about thinking about becoming an interior designer, like gosh I hate to give up this 13 year career that I built. And like all of these incredible relationships I've made, it feels almost wasteful to just kick that to the side and do something totally different. So that's where the idea of Cailini Coastal came in. And then I, I chose to focus on the accents specifically because at the time my husband and I were renting a house and I've been a renter until six weeks ago. We just bought our first home. But, my entire 13 year career adult life and one it was for a large majority of my career, it wasn't realistic for me to afford the expensive furniture I would see in a lot of catalogs, magazines and online. And also, with being in a temporary space. I felt like I never wanted to invest in expensive furniture because you never knew what the next space was going to be and maybe it wouldn't fit, or it wouldn't look right with the rugs or whatever it was. So, I always really focused on accents. And again, that was sort of an opportunity I saw. Like, there's not a lot of places that are just doing the accents and accessories. I found some great places in the coastal vein, which is what I specialize in, Cailini Coastal does, some great places that had awesome coastal furniture, but not a lot that were selling like really wonderful picture frames or vases or these cool decorative accessories like sea glass beads, these little things that are much less expensive, even if they are luxury because they're smaller items. So that's how it all came to be.
Madeline [00:18:29] So, for our listeners who are not yet familiar and have not yet shopped with you and hopefully will check you out, can you just tell them what is your business and how to find you online?
Meg Young [00:18:43] Sure. So, it's Cailinicoastal.com and we're also @Cailinicoastal on Instagram and Cailini Coastal on Facebook. However, I will be honest and say we're not super active on Facebook, but Cailini Coastal means coastal girls in Irish. My family and my husband's family, we're Irish of Irish heritage. And we've got our two little girls, and because it came from a place of passion and doing something I loved, I wanted to name it for the girls without using their names and sort of like inspiring them to follow their heart, follow their passion. And, we live right by the coast. So, coastal girls in Irish are for my little coastal girls and or excuse me, Cailini Coastal and Cailini is spelled C-A-I-L-I-N-I.
Madeline [00:19:38] And you have the most beautiful Instagram, I don't know if I mentioned this, but I'm podcasting today from Portland, Maine, another coastal town, and just every room and every accent. I mean, I just I want all of it for my house.
Meg Young [00:19:51] Oh thank you. That's the best compliment. Thank you.
Madeline [00:19:53] So, can you tell our listeners just in terms of the actual process of, OK, so you've arrived at this decision, you've got a business name and you know how it's going to mix your skill set. What were your actual concrete steps in getting going with launching the business?
Meg Young [00:20:07] So, I made the decision that I wanted to, once I knew I wanted to start Cailini Coastal and I still had a lot to hash out. I sort of knew I wanted to start an e-commerce shop. I had the name, but I didn't know a heck of a lot else. So, I decided I wanted to end my PR partnerships. And the reason I did that was because I wanted to make sure that my clients knew. And also for me, just sort of being an honest, good employee or consultant, I should say that when I was working on these brands, they were getting one-hundred percent of me and I wasn't distracted trying to build something on the side that was just really important to me, sort of like the integrity of my brand and the PR brand. And so, I wrapped up with my clients at the end of December of last year. Twenty nineteen. And then January 1st was let's figure out this business, let's build this business. So, I of course, made sure it was my last paycheck was December of 2019. And, I of course made sure I had the savings and all of that to be able to, to do this. And I took those first. Gosh, what was it, like three-and-a-half months to build the website, source all of the products, get all of the licenses and set up the business legally, all of that. My husband actually has his own business. It's in a very different realm, it's in recruiting. But he's a business mind that got into a recruiting business as sort of a different route than I did, starting something from an area I was interested in. And so, he was really helpful with some of those early stages of setting up the business. I had also set up a PR business. So, while it was a smaller and a very different business, I'd known a bit already of how to do that. But, there's a lot of sources online if you're, if you're thinking about that. And there's also, I want to just share with the listeners, there's an incredible resource called SCORE.com, S-C-O-R-E. I don't know if you ladies have heard of it. A friend of mine who'd started a business recommended. I look into it and I did. And I also thought it was phenomenal. It's, they pair you with, it's free and they pair you with mentors in similar fields. So, it's mostly successful, successful businesspeople, not all entrepreneurs. There's a lot of CEOs or executives in different fields who are retired, and they want to give back. And one of the ways they want to get back is to help younger generations in other industries. And, so I did that early on and I was partnered with a successful e-commerce guy. And he was really valuable to just sort of making sure I had all my ducks in a row and from the business side. And inventory was a big thing. So, I used all of my personal savings, went into Cailini Coastal and pretty much every dime went into inventory. So, for e-commerce, you if you're selling things, there's two options. You either warehouse the inventory or you drop ship. We do actually both. So, our larger items drop ship, which means they ship directly from our vendor. And then about 60 percent of what we sell comes from Cailini Coastal. So, I had to buy that. And as I mentioned earlier, one of the things I saw an opportunity for sort of these interior designers’ websites that had this beautiful items was just that they were limited selection. And so, I wanted to launch with around two-hundred SKUs at launch, which was a lot. And again, some of them were being drop shipped. I couldn't afford to buy 20 of each SKU. I was buying twos, maybe at most six of a SKU and there were some vendors who wouldn't work for me, work with me because our purchase orders were too small. For the most part, I was able to work with most of the vendors I was reaching out to, but it was a huge expense. A bit terrifying because, you know, it was just like watching my savings dwindle, dwindle and again, I have a husband that was a huge safety net. So, kudos to the women. I honestly don't know if I would have had the nerve to do this if I was still single. Because it was very beneficial having a dual household income, but it was just watching it dwindling and thinking, is anyone going to buy this? I can't return it like I'm going to have, and I was warehousing it temporarily in the garage. And our garage was like moving the Christmas trees to the side and putting up racks and filling it with picture frames, with seashells. And so that was sort of the next step was sourcing and getting the inventory. Now, this was probably late February when I started sourcing. I had to get my seller's permit. I had to get the business set up, then get the seller's permit. So, I went through all the steps and going through the government for anything takes ...
Madeline [00:25:42] Forever.
Meg Young [00:25:44] Ages. So, it was probably around the end of February when I finally could start sourcing. Now, as we all know, come mid-March, like we were on lockdown and not going anywhere. So, that was really interesting. I very fortunately had during January, February, done a ton of research, so pretty much identified a lot of the vendors I wanted to work with and was able to get the rest of the sourcing done sort of via email. And then it was, yeah, like I said, building the website. I would say the biggest thing for me was the buildup on Instagram and posting regularly and engaging with people. Anyone's who thinking about building any kind of business and leveraging Instagram, the thing that I found to be most valuable, which felt very genuine to just I enjoy engaging with people and I want to know who my customers are, was establishing a lot of personal connections. So even when I had six-hundred followers. People would message me and say, I love this post, I love your home, it's so beautiful. I was taking all these pictures in our home at the time and just kind of getting to know them and where they live. And it's so funny. There's about a half-dozen customers now who I know so much about. Like I know their kids’ names. I know their occupation. I know probably like off the top of my head everything they've ordered on Cailini Coastal. So, that was great. So, there was a lot of this build up online, sort of teasing out, we're launching and engaging and getting to know the customers, always responding to them. I feel like having been on the receiving end of that, you know, if there's a brand I love and I message them something, especially a DM, which is harder to miss and they don't respond, it always feels a little bit like, oh, OK, I guess they don't care. And so, I made a point to like anyone who messaged me, like, I message you back and still do. And so, launch came. It was so exciting and so nerve racking. I was really proud of the website as much as I could be. I took iPhone photos because I couldn't have a photo shoot because of Covid. And at the time we were in this rental that was sort of this like nineties tract home, Spanish style home, which is not at all Cailini Coastal. And I had like two rooms I could photograph or maybe three spaces I could photograph that were bland enough. I could kind of pull it off with my accessories. And everything was shot on the iPhone and with amazing filters, light and airy app is a game changer. And I post all this stuff and it just felt very much like fake it till you make it. And it was amazing. We launched on April 30th to our subscribers. We had about, I'm trying to think, I think at launch we had about five-hundred subscribers, email subscribers around launch. That wasn't a huge number, but it was, it was good. Again, this is sort of like self-funded. I was like, this is good. It's just me doing everything. So, I felt happy with that. And we launched our subscribers April 30th and then it went live to everyone. April 31st. Or May 1st, but we launched and we are watching the sales come in and the web traffic and we're on Shopify as our platform and they show you all these great analytics and you can see a map of the country because we're just national currently and it's lighting up with where people are. And it's like, oh, my gosh, there's five people on. Whoa, there's 15, oh my God, there's 30 people on! And they, Shopify also I have an app on my phone and every time a sale comes through, I didn't set this. It just does this, it goes, cha ching! And all of a sudden, my phone is like cha ching, cha ching! And I wake up in the morning and I think we had 30 orders our first night. We launched it like 9 p.m. Pacific and we had like fifteen-thousand dollars in sales overnight. By the end of the first week, we had one-hundred-and-five sales and it was just me from my garage with two toddlers at home during Covid. And it was one of those actually my score mentor called it the, a "success catastrophe." And it was. Like, I was so blown away and like I was like, oh my gosh. But then I had to fulfill one-hundred orders by myself and the whole fulfillment process of like we handwrite notes in every single order, every single order gets a handwritten note and a seashell of some kind. And it's like they go in an envelope, like we take pride in sort of the presentation of the package you get. And so, it feels very boutique and very personal. So that was a lot of handwritten notes. I didn't even have enough boxes. I couldn't sustain it for long term if it kept up that way. And I remember like some customers who had placed an order on Thursday were emailing me on Saturday asking for the status, I was like, oh my God, I'm like Amazon!Like I'm a one woman show in my garage with two toddlers running around. And I'm like, "Emmie give me back that tape gun." Like, it was so chaotic and awesome and wonderful and stressful. I thought, like, I truly lost so much sleep that week and was pulling all-nighters. But it was awesome. And it was funny because I remember thinking, oh gosh, like, this is so amazing. But I need this to slow down because, like, I cannot sustain this. And also, we're a month into quarantine. And nothing was open at that point. Like, I couldn't hire anyone. I think also everyone was very freaked out at that stage with like, we didn't know as much as we know now about it. So, yeah, so that, so that was launch.
Madeline [00:32:06] And how did you actually fulfill the orders? Were you shipping them then out of your garage, like by having a postal worker come?
Meg Young [00:32:13] Yes, totally out of the garage. I mean next to like workout gear and Christmas trees and yeah, exactly. So, it was fully at home warehouse situation. We sold out of so many items because remember, I had only bought like twos to six. So, that was a huge challenge and has been, continued to be one of our biggest challenges. Launch during Covid, where warehouses across the country are shut down and then try to re-order. So, I had products set up. So, if I sold more than I had, it would go into preorder and then people could preorder because I didn't want to sell out of two things. If it did go well, like two is really easy to sell and I didn't want to then limit myself to, OK, I can only sell two of these items. I was working actually with a bookkeeper who helped me set up some things on Shopify and I distinctly remember her saying I said, well, what if we sell a lot? And she's like, well, and it wasn't like she didn't have confidence in the business, but she's like, I mean, if you sell that many that you're that out of stock, that's a good problem. We'll, we'll worry about that if that happens. And it was like that's exactly what happened. And then I was calling her and saying, oh, my gosh, wait a second. We have like we're like negative fifty. We collect all of the items together. How do we get these products back? So, then I emailed, of course, all the vendors that first week, in addition to packaging orders, and a lot of them were incomplete. Or we can send you this phase, but we're out of this, you know, coffee table book. We had to re-order. So, I, I placed re-orders and I was getting so much OK, this will be back in three months. And then it became this another potential disaster. Everyone's going to cancel because who's going to want to wait? But thankfully, there was a lot of kindness. I think I started to realize after the fact is when we moved even in August of this year and we were placing furniture orders, that even the big guys were backlogged. Even the big guys had three-months lead times. And these are like legit businesses with big teams. And, you know, I mean, I was legit, but it was me in a garage. It was a completely different thing. And I had to give myself some kindness and realize, you know what? Like, if customers want to cancel, absolutely fine. We hardly had any cancellations. People were happy to wait and. Yeah, so that was great.
Madeline [00:35:01] So just to back up for one, I have one question. How did you actually find vendors? What was that process, I mean, was that Google or?
Meg Young [00:35:08] So, OK, this is sort of a little bit, well it's so funny. I've had a few people ask me this because I didn't know. Right? I didn't come from that industry at all. I don't have any friends in the interior's world. So, first, my first step was I looked around my own house of things that I owned, that I loved, that I got not as much vintage finds, although some of that did inspire what the types of items I was looking for. But for example, picture frames and I'd pick up four picture frames I have, and I turn them over and I'd see these stickers. It was the brand, the manufacturer. And then I'd say, oh, gosh, like we've got, I have four picture frames from the same manufacturers and then Google the manufacturer. Oh my gosh, I have this tree. I own this tree from them. I own this vase from them. I love their items. Reach out to them. So, there was a little bit of that. There were also some things that didn't have stickers, were vases. I remember this one vase specifically, I bought from this boutique, this little Jersey Shore boutique a couple of years ago. And I just loved it. And I'm like, I need to find this vase. I'm obsessed with hydrangeas. And it's like the perfect hydrangea vase and same thing. It took me weeks to find this vase. I kept googling like kind of the shape of it, the style of it, all these different things I thought it could be. And then I finally found it. And again, it was the same thing. Once I found that I realized this brand sold like a plethora of other items that I've seen other places that I thought were really cute. So, a lot of that just sort of like or simply something like a Demijohn which is sort of a glass almost like ball shape with a narrow neck. A lot of times they're vintage and made of glass. Those are very coastal and beautiful on like a center island or an entryway and I wanted to sell those. So, I just Googled and looked on Etsy and did a lot of that. But also, there's a market in downtown L.A. called The L.A. Mart, and I'm sure they have them all over similar markets in lots of major cities that sells a lot of big home brands go there, so or I should say have showrooms there. So, I thankfully went down late February. Almost as soon as I got my seller's permit, I went down there and there were a lot of great vendors I found just through walking around the space and kind of stumbling in. And now it's exciting, five-and-a-half months in, we're in a place where we actually have some vendors reach out to us, which is really cool. All of our art is, I love supporting other women in business and also businesses that are similar to mine that are in sort of those growing stages. And all of the female artists we sell or all the art, I should say, in our shop comes from female artists and they're all varying sizes, but they're all boutiquey, I would say, really unique and there were a couple I found, I think through Instagram. Instagram was big, big for the art. And now we actually have a lot of artists reaching out to us, which is really cool and exciting. And so, yeah, so Instagram, the Google and then the Google, Google and then of course just sort of like looking at my own home and thinking like what do I personally love. That was a big thing for me. I had no experience buying. And so again, with like going with my gut, I thought I'm going to put things in the shop that sort of fit my esthetic, which is this hybrid of like East Coast, West Coast. I grew up in New York and New Jersey, spent a lot of summers in the Hamptons and down the shore in Jersey, you know that Nantucket look, the Hamptons look, the Palm Beach look, like the whole East Coast. And then I've lived in California right by the water for eight years, which is a little bit more laid back, casual, lots of like bringing in natural materials. So, it's a bit of a hybrid of the two. And I just looked for things that really, I would be excited to place in my own home. And funny enough or not, the items that I was a little bit lukewarm, but thought, oh, people like this, I should add this did not sell. So that was pretty quick to realize. And thankfully, again, because I bought such narrow, so narrow in the beginning, I was able to, you know, still move those pieces because I only had two of them or four of them and some I did have to discount. But that was a big quick lesson learned of, if I Meg personally would not want this in my home or be excited about it, I'm not buying it. So, yeah.
Madeline [00:40:18] That's your intuition speaking again.
Meg Young [00:40:20] Totally, yes.
Madeline [00:40:22] So, what do you wish that you'd known before you started Cailini Coastal.
Meg Young [00:40:28] Well, a whole lot probably. You know, it's funny, I really, I went in not knowing a lot. I mean, truly, it was such a crapshoot of, I in my gut felt like once the success happened and five and a half months in, it's even more successful than I could have imagined. There's a part of me that's like, "what? I don't know what I'm doing, how the heck is happening?" But, on the other hand, there's also part of me that's like, I knew, like I feel like I finally found that thing that was like constantly coming up of like, this isn't right. This isn't right. And I feel like I finally now found that thing. That is right. So, I mean, there's so much I wish I knew. So much about, like starting a website and like the back end of Shopify and how much time I spent trying to teach myself all that. I taught myself some coding. I mean, there's so much I wish I knew to save myself time. I wish I knew vendors and had those relationships. There were some vendors who were so excited just to see a PO and there were others who were sort of like, you know what, you're the new kid. We're not really interested. The funny thing is now I had a lot of vendors actually tell me because I didn't have a brick and mortar store, they weren't interested. And, I remember thinking, really, gosh, this is 2020. Like, I feel like digital is the wave of the future. Well, now with Covid, unfortunately, it's had such a horrible impact on retail. Online is the place, I mean for retail businesses to survive and thrive right now that a lot of these retailers that or vendors I should say initially that weren't interested, are very interested. So, it's like I wish I had a leg up or a foot in the door or more of a knowledge on 20 different areas of the business that I knew and know still nothing about. I'm just learning. But at the same time, I think there's a sense of real pride that comes with truly figuring it out. And even though my PR business, yes, I started my own business, I ran that by myself, ran and operated that by myself. I was an entrepreneur. This business feels so much more entrepreneurial to me. And I think it's just because that business felt safer. It was very low investment next to no investment, very low risk. I had this great experience. I knew exactly what to do. I had a ton of relationships. This business was a huge investment. I mean, truly, like all of my personal savings, which always sounds weird and I'm married, but like I always kind of liked having my shoe money, my like, "I'm buying this for the girls, and I make money" and it's sort of like shared. And then we have our own separate, like that went completely into Cailini Coastal. And so very big investment. It just in terms of like for me personally, it felt like a big investment and very high risk because I knew no one. I knew no one, and I knew nothing about what I was doing. So, the fact that it's taken off, how it has is just like so much more rewarding. And so, I would love to say I wish I knew more, but in a way, I feel like it's actually probably good. I did it because you figure it out. You know?
Madeline [00:44:06] And can you just tell us about the philanthropic component of Cailini Coastal?
Meg Young [00:44:12] So, this is actually a really big part of our brand, especially these first six months, so I mentioned earlier when we were chatting that I had these two sort of goals for myself in this second life career, and it was something that personally brought me joy, excited me, came from a place of passion and then something that allowed me to, like, impact others and do good. And that was a weirder thing to connect, because I thought, OK, now I've sort of identified what I want to do now. What is the positive impact of like selling home decor? And so, it's kind of similar to how I came to the idea of starting Cailini Coastal, I did a lot of research. I actually worked with a dear friend of mine. She started a business after a very long and successful sales career called the Cause Bar. It's all about helping women specifically find their, women who want to give back, find sort of like what their mission is and align them with the right charities. So, it's sort of like if you've got X amount of hours to give, X amount of dollars to give, what matters to you most? And it's not necessarily just in like for me, it was very much people, as I mentioned, helping people and giving back to people and that human. But it could be a passion of yours, you know, saving the environment is something, you know, if there's policies, you really feel passionately about, education. It's a plethora of different sort of organizations. And so, she really helped me figure out what was most meaningful to me. And we did, had a couple of sessions. And at the end of one of the sessions, we just sort of figured it out. Like to me the biggest thing was kids and families, parents with kids. Now that I am a parent and specifically sort of like I can't imagine a child not having the basic needs, I can't imagine being a parent and not being able to provide those basic needs. What a horrible, horrible position to be in and just feeling so deeply for both parents and children in those scenarios. And she introduced me to this incredible organization called Family Promise, which is a national charity that's existed since the 80s, really renowned, really respected. It's won a ton of awards for just transparency and how they use their dollars. And so much of it is really going to the work versus administrative. And their whole mission is to help end family homelessness, is simply said as it is. And so, there's some staggering facts like thirty-five percent of homeless people in the country are our families, like families make up thirty-five percent of the homeless population. And its sort of called the invisible crisis because you know and so much of this I've learned, families aren't usually on the streets. They're in shelters, they're living in cars. They're doubled, tripled, quadrupled up in apartments with families or friends. So, it's not as in-your-face as, as you would think it would be, when you heard that stat, hence the invisible crisis, and they don't only work with families who are truly homeless, but they also work with families who are on the cusp of losing their home. And they do a ton of work with low income families as well to sort of prevent them from that eviction. It's much harder to get them back in a home once they're out than it is to just protect them from losing their home. So, it's just a beautiful organization nationwide. I love that they do a ton of work to not only just get these resources to them, but also make it sustainable. So, they help them with interviewing skills and getting, you know, jobs and education with their children and all of it. And so just a really quick note. I'm long winded, but this is such a cool, I think, tidbit. So, I mentioned my parents were very philanthropic growing up. My mother actually, unfortunately, passed many years ago when I was in college from ALS. And my dad in his retired years has sort of dedicated his life to giving back. He's really involved with a lot of different organizations. So, when I identified Family Promise, I emailed my dad, I wanted to make sure aside from all the research I had done, this guy who's much more involved with charities than I am, I wanted him to look through his lens, sort of look at the charity. And he said, does this name sound familiar to you? And I was like, No, not at all. Why? It turns out, I mentioned they started in the 80s. They actually started out of Newark, New Jersey. And my family lived half my life in New York, half in New Jersey, was living in New Jersey. It was a charity that my mom was personally involved with for many years. And when she passed, she gave my dad two charities she cared about that she wanted him to always continue to be involved with and donate to on her behalf and Family Promise was one of them. And so, it was, again, just like one of those "alright, like, got it. Like, this is it." So, it, and it also like it came from again, like a truly a personal what mattered to me. But then again, it also fit beautifully because here we are selling these luxuries for the home that only anyone who's able to buy something from Cailini Coastal is probably in a very different situation than these families and able to buy like a beautiful frame or light or whatever it is. And I thought, what better fit than, like, helping families who don't even have the basic need of a home? And so that's how the charity came to be. And then the last thing I'll just say is I knew I wanted to donate a portion of proceeds. And we were in the midst of figuring out, like, what's that number that allows us to be profitable but still impactful. And it turns out in the midst of this Covid happened. And when I was talking to Family Promise, they were telling me just what a disaster, of course, this was for so many of their families, because many of their families were hourly workers who lived paycheck to paycheck, who now had no paycheck indefinitely. And it was just like a super, super clear thing to me of I was prepared to launch this business, not make a dime, because it could have totally failed. And I was going to give it a year if it was really bad and two years if it was like doing OK. But I was basically prepared to, like, not have it do, potentially completely fail. So, I thought I'm going to give one-hundred percent of profits. If this business makes so much of five-dollars, everything is going to help these families because that ultimately is most important to me. And we sort of looked at it, my husband and I have like, OK, if the business is profitable at some point, like, I do need to pay myself and sort of like pay expenses, et cetera. And so, what sort of like the longest we can do that for. And it was six-months. It's like, let's push it as far as we can. And it was sort of six-months was the threshold of that, so for the first six-months of business, we are donating one-hundred percent of our profits to Family Promise, we've already donated about seven-thousand dollars. So, it's pretty incredible.
Madeline [00:52:25] Congratulations, that's wonderful. And for our listeners who are interested in getting involved or donating, how can they find out about the charity?
Meg Young [00:52:35] Sure. So, they're Familypromise.org. We have it also on our on our website, we have on our sort of header bar we've got in our cause tab with tons of information about them there and a link to their website.In addition to the financial donation, I also felt it was incredibly important to support them by raising awareness. So, we do a lot of that as well, talking about the work we’re doing, the work they're doing. Actually, this afternoon after our podcast, I'm heading down to our local chapter. We just donated part of the seven thousand was five thousand donation to our local chapter, who is setting up a remote learning center for some of their families, because when you're homeless and you don't have access to laptops, it's absolutely impossible to learn. So, we've got some information on our site, but I definitely encourage you to check out their site.
Madeline [00:53:31] That sounds great. And we'll link it in our show notes too our listeners who are interested in also learning more. So, as we head towards the end here, I want to ask you a few pieces of advice for our listeners first, who are starting an e-commerce business. Do you have one good tip that you could provide to them?
Meg Young [00:53:49] Hmm. One. OK, well, if you're debating platforms, I will say Shopify is phenomenal. I can't recommend them enough. I think once you get into it, it's pretty intuitive and they have every resource you could possibly need. So, I think choosing the right platform is really, really, really important. And Shopify makes it so easy.
Madeline [00:54:16] That's great. In terms of do you have one piece of advice for listeners about an accent that they could put in their home that would bring them joy or finding that accent piece, I'm thinking specifically with so many people working from home and everybody sitting in their rooms, I mean, I know I've done this. I'm redecorating, painting. I mean, I've got so many projects going on because we're in our homes all the time. I've never been home this much. So, for our listeners who are thinking, jeez, maybe I want to add one or two things here, maybe, maybe it's an apartment and they can't do all those projects. What would you recommend?
Madeline [00:54:55] Sure, so I would recommend one of two things. I would recommend a beautiful photo frame. And I mean, what gives you more joy than looking at someone you love? Like a spouse, a best friend, a child. And that's so easy to place on your desk. And we have a lot of photo frames. That's actually, that was a weird thing for me. I'm like, where do I go for photo frames? So, we've got some really special ones on the shop. And then the other thing is a piece of art. And again, if you're in a room where you're working all day, that's just such, again, such a nice thing to look at, that some sort of transport you whether it's a watercolor or a photography, piece of photography or an original piece of art, those two, I would probably say think lift your mood the best.
Madeline [00:55:45] And what advice do you have for our listeners, other women about developing professional self-confidence? What has worked for you?
Meg Young [00:55:54] I would say have a mentor, and it doesn't have to be somebody you don't know who's in the industry. I mean, it can be if you have like a boss who's an amazing mentor or it can be a parent, it can be a friend, but have somebody who's sort of your unbiased cheerleader. I think it's really important to surround yourself with support. I have worked for some incredible people and I have worked for some not so good people. And I will tell you, when I've worked for the not good people, I felt horrible and I think everyone does. So, if you can surround yourself with people who support you, who will teach you and sort of guide you and certainly tell you if you're doing something wrong and show you how to do it right, but also are sort of your own little cheerleaders. I think, especially if you're thinking about starting a business, like man, it's tough and you definitely need like a cheerleader or two who tells you on the days where you're like, I cannot do this, I'm closing this. This is a disaster who just are there and have your back.
Becca [00:57:20] We hope you enjoyed our interview with Meg, you can shop her beautiful decor and learn more about family promise on her website Cailinicoastal.com. You can connect with Meg on Instagram @cailinicoastal. If you enjoyed our podcast hit, subscribe and leave us a review. Thank you always to our home team of friends and family for supporting us in our mission. This episode was produced and edited by Madeline and Becca. Thanks for tuning in. And remember, you are somebody.