So I had just graduated from college. My degree is a bachelor's in psychology and the original plan was to go on to graduate school. There's not a whole lot you can do with just an undergrad in psych and I, at the same time was planning my wedding. So through that process and spending an embarrassing amount of time on Pinterest, I really couldn't figure out what to do for wedding favors for whatever reason that was like by far the hardest part of wedding planning was to figure out what to give out as wedding favors.

00:04:44Edit And so naturally I didn't want to be something that was going to be wasteful or end up, you know, thrown away or guess not wanting, nobody wanted a picture of mine and drew my husband's face on a magnet like to put on the refrigerator. Nobody wants that. Yeah, it just, it was a whole lot of money for something that I wanted to be practical and food seemed like a fit to look through that. So I was scrolling through hours of instagram Pinterest, all of that and so all of the upgrades that are really commonplace now. So sugar cookies that look like works of art, I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about or like donut walls or something like that. And one of the things that I popped popped up on my screen was cotton candy, but I was super disappointed in the options. It was a lot of just pink or blue with no actual flavor attached to it and the packaging was honestly left something to be desired. So I really couldn't let it go. I just kept thinking about it. And on the way back from my honeymoon, we drove like 20 hours in one day to get home and I turned to, yeah, that was a whole other whole other thing.

00:05:52Edit But I turned to drew and said, hey, I have this idea, what do you think about me starting a cotton candy company and the original idea behind it was to do events. So we would come to weddings bar and bat mitzvahs birthday parties, professional sporting events, spin live cotton candy fresh on site and really make it an experience And I fully expected him to look at me and be like, girl you're crazy, go get, go get a real job, go to graduate school, what, what are you doing? We're freshly married, we got married very young and he didn't so all of the props to him because he immediately was like, I think this is a fantastic idea, you you have to do this. So in that car ride home we came up with the business name and secured all of the social media handles the domain name for the website, everything on that car ride home and that's where Art of Sucre was born. A 20 hour like Jam, a power jam, literally that's exactly what it was just like noted out all the bits and bobs on the spot.

00:06:59Edit I love it. That's so cool, wow. And so, but like you didn't have any experience in doing cotton candy making, like how did you know what to do? How did you start finding clients? So it's so funny looking back on it. I was so young and naive in a good way. I had never touched a cotton candy machine before. I decided to make this business. Like I had, I had no business starting a business like that's just the reality of it to any sane person like on the outside looking in. Yeah, So I spent a lot of time on youtube and google and figuring out how to just make it work. I bought my first cotton candy machine with the money from our wedding and we lived in like this tiny condo at the time and just started whipping up cotton candy on my own. And I really took to social media to find my first paying client. And actually the first day we did events in the beginning.

00:08:02Edit So that was the vision. That's what we did for four years. So my first day of having a paid event, I actually had two events back to back, which is an insane thing that I agreed to. But at the time I was like, I can't say no to the money. I have to have to do this and all came through social media and one of the first people that paid me was a dress shop that sold wedding dresses and so she? Re posted about me and it really just kind of took off from there. One event led to another led to me quitting my like two part time jobs and taking artistic work full time in less than a year. How much did you spend on buying that piece of machinery in the beginning? And how much were you charging for an event in the beginning? Oh gosh! I think my first machine all in was right around $500. So not a ton of money when it comes to starting a business. I would say between getting like my LLC and paperwork and all of that done, it was just under $1000 to get started.

00:09:05Edit And in the beginning I was charging not nearly enough money and quite honestly, it was just excited. Of course. Yeah. Just excited to have somebody want me to be there. So I was charging anywhere between like 75 to maybe $150 $200 to go and do these events. Oh wow. You're a real Boggan. I was, yes. Yeah. If you get in with us that first year, you were very lucky because you got a really good deal. Let's just say that. So at some point the bookings are just kind of word of mouth. It's starting to pour in. When do you think, Oh, I should raise my prices and how can I like turn this into a bigger thing because obviously it's just you at that point, right? Like you're just hustling your time to go to these events. I imagine you must have been really busy. It's like you're capped at the level, you know, because you've only got so much time. 1000%. I really, until we transitioned to like our online store and what we do now I would lose sleep over that I knew that I had a really cool idea. I knew that I was successful on my own. It was my full time job.

00:10:07Edit I was paying the bills. I was doing everything. I was exhausted. It was seven days a week. There were some days that I was doing myself like three or four events a day. I would do, you know, a morning event, I would do one kind of like mid, like late morning, mid afternoon and afternoon event and then evening I was gone all the time. I was exhausted. I was running myself into the ground. It wasn't feasible to have a social life or you know, start a family one day, all of all of the things, it just wasn't, it was not working. And even when I raised prices, there's still a cap, you know, there's only so much people are going to want to pay for cotton candy as a dessert. So it wasn't like I could back down to a lower amount of events to make up for that money. The growth was still, there was absolutely a ceiling there that I was hitting. And what changed that, to be totally honest with you is absolutely the pandemic. Yeah, let's get into what happened.

00:11:09Edit You know, obviously March 2020 hits, you're an events-based business, you're doing really well as kind of the one woman show and you're busy, but you're also burnt out and you're also kept with your potential, what happens The, I'll never forget. It was right around my wedding anniversary, which is very ironic in all of this when I got married in, in March and March 12 and that was quite literally like the day that the world shut down here in Cleveland Ohio for us, that was, you know, the stay at home orders were starting to come down all of that and cotton candy is obviously clearly not essential nor should it be. And so I went from running myself into the ground to being a stay at home dog mom, can I just ask you a question before we keep going? Are you able to share, like what kind of revenue were you doing at that point? Because obviously you go from like doing revenue to like zero I imagine to paint the picture. Yeah, so I would annually, I believe at that point we were, I was bringing in around like 70-80 $1000 a year, which was comfortable.

00:12:11Edit My overhead was extremely low because it was just me and so it was super comfortable, nothing to sneeze at, but nothing too, you know, it's like you created yourself a job essentially quite literally. That's what I had done. Absolutely. And the interesting part about that is that it, and it's like this now too, but it varied extreme because obviously in the summer we were way busier than I was or if you were sick or something. Yeah, or even, you know at that point what if there was like a family emergency, like I had to miss family funerals and things like that because there was no one else to carry the weight of what I was doing. So it was a whole little quite literally a one woman show at that point. So the world shutdown went from being working all the time, stay at home dog mom. And at the time we were told it was two weeks, right. You know, you're like, I'm having a bit of a holiday, like a false holiday. No, little like quite literally, that's what it felt like in this. It sounds, I hate to say this out loud, but it was my reality.

00:13:14Edit It was almost like a sigh of relief. I'm, I'm very aware of how privileged that is to be able to say that and to be able to be in a situation that I was not sick, no one else was sick any of those things. But it kind of felt like a, oh I can take, I can take a pause here and then very quickly as we all know that that is not at all the reality of what happened. And so I found myself a couple of months later at this point saying, okay, I have to figure something out. Do I go and get a real job As I like to tease, do I start a new business from scratch that's more friendly to the world that we're now living in or do I pivot what I already have and try to make it work in this new space. And one day it just all of a sudden clicked out of nowhere after a lot of tears and a lot of processing and a lot of hard conversations and I decided to move into the packaging space and I was going to find a way to package the magic of what we did live and in person to be able to ship out anywhere.

00:14:21Edit And at the time I was thinking, you know, there's a lot of opportunity here, but pretty small ship in the U. S. And my state probably specifically. But Tiktok really came into play for us and that is what really expanded our opportunities and horizons beyond anything that I could have imagined at that time. Let's talk about the Tiktok thing because for all the listeners tuning in, you have 1.2 million followers as of today, you have like millions and millions and millions of likes and views and you know, all the crazy stuff and you've obviously just absolutely blown up from the power of Tiktok. How long did it take for it to start snowballing? Like, can you step me through those early days of creating content on Tiktok? Yes, it happened very quickly. I don't know if you were like this during lockdown, but I was consuming Tiktok, which I think like much of the world was to be honest with you. And it was something that drew and I were texting back and forth to each other throughout the day and you know, friends, family, all that stuff.

00:15:29Edit So I really took the time to consume. And at some point when I decided to switch to this packaging, I was like, why am I not sharing what I do on here? It's unique. It's really cool. Not a lot of people know about it. And so I started just doing really trial and air of what was going overwhelmed. So I started posting day in the life videos. Here's me, you know, Planning on this online store. Here's a day in the life of owning a cotton candy company and a pandemic. Here's what events used to look like. Here's our little cotton candy studio that we have all of our equipment in that kind of stuff. And when I truly mean this, the first video that we had that really went kind of viral. I think it got maybe two million views. It's the dumbest video I've ever posted Casually. Oh, you know, I got two million views. I don't to this day. I do not understand why this video has that many views. It's the dumbest video. It's literally just a bag that we used to take two cotton candy events and it's me packing it as I thought and it's just my hands and it's my voice saying, all right, we're gonna grab this flavor of watermelon sugar, we're gonna grab these cotton candy cones and this extension cord and that was it.

00:16:46Edit And people were like, tell me more, I want to hear more. They were commenting on how I pronounced, I think it was pina colada, which is a whole other thing about, about Tiktok, my skin had to grow thick pretty quickly. But from there we had more videos just start popping off of just day in the life kind of stuff and what really put us on the map. I had a friend that got married who used to help out with events occasionally and she did a very small backyard wedding and we did cotton candy for it and it was her spinning cotton candy in her wedding dress And that video has 25 million views. See that when I browse, that's so cute. I love that. Yes, Rachel is an angel and I think it was just a story behind it, of us being friends, her helping me out and being so supportive and then her actual wedding day, it was so sweet and Tiktok felt that way too. And that's by far our most viewed video, but that's really kind of what put us on the map and people started to take notice after that.

00:17:52Edit That is crazy. I have so many different questions on like different parts. So just to stick with Tiktok for a few minutes more before we get into like what the impact of that was and like where you were with your online store, what was your posting schedule then, and what is it now, like how much content are you putting out on Tiktok and reels in the beginning? I was posting three times a day and that's because I had nothing else going on. I wasn't doing events. My main focus was to grow that account and to really ride that wave while it was, you know, going really well for us. We didn't have the packaging, done that, whole process took about a year. So it was, yeah, it was very time consuming a lot of trial and air, but it provided great content because we were able to in real time, you know, explain to the audience like, hey, what do you want to see? Here's what I'm thinking, here's what's going on behind the scenes and being really vulnerable, raw and real and bringing people through that journey.

00:18:57Edit I think it endeared a lot of people into supporting the business, to wanting to be a part of it. And they were, I mean, they were really part of the journey. So in the beginning I was posting a lot now as things have grown, I've taken a little bit of a step back or had, because it, it takes a lot of time and energy. So once the store started kind of taking off, I had to All of a sudden train, a team of 20 people and you know, that comes with its own set of growing pains and learning and all of that and I had to figure out shipping, I had so many things now on my plate, I took a step back but we are ramping up to start posting three videos again a day just to see where we're at. Unpredictability is part of what makes starting and growing a business both exciting and terrifying from the next loan payment to your next big sale or your next acquisition, finding predictability and business is about as likely as finding a last minute valentine's day dinner reservation, unlikely hubspot Crm platform is here to help grow and scale with you through uncertainty.

00:20:05Edit So you can spend your time getting to that dinner reservation, hub sports reporting dashboard is like your crystal ball giving you a bird's eye view on your marketing, your sales and customer service performance. So you can get ahead of any issues before they happen, lead rotation and automation takes on operational sales tasks. So your team can focus on customer needs and shared inboxes, make incoming chats and emails easy to manage and scale for the whole team, learn more about how a hubspot Crm platform can help your business grow better at hubspot dot com. When you say, you know, you have to grow a thick skin because of you know people online. How do you deal with that. Like how do you deal with the negativity or like people saying shitty comments, that was something that I don't think people really think about when you talk about going viral in anyway. Um and it was even more shocking to me, I feel like because I wasn't expecting it in the way that it happened because I rarely show my face or not that I'm like hiding anything, but I'm I'm not the brand, people want to see cotton candy at most.

00:21:22Edit It's my voice that people recognize in my hands and so things that people would pick apart and would be brutal about would not be things that I was prepared for. Does that make sense? And it was in now looking back, it's I can see it clearer and see like, oh it's just trolls or oh that's just part of being on the internet and you know, it's unfortunately where we live in the space at the time, it was really difficult. I would spend all night not sleeping really just scrolling through comments of people saying the silliest things, like commenting on how I would open a bottle of soda or how I would pronounce certain things or that I was killing the environment because we used this type of packaging or just very, I mean I've been called incredible names that you can't believe on the internet for like cotton candy and it's, it's a dark side of going viral.

00:22:23Edit It is equal parts the best thing that has happened to me as far as career wise and and all of that and there's also the hardest thing, It's super lonely and there is absolutely this sense of you can't control what's happening to you at the, at the same time. And it happens fast. So again, it was equal parts really incredible and such a gift. And it was also really hard and a really dark time through trying to figure all of that out. Yeah. And I feel like it's one of those things like it's easy to say like you have to develop a thick skin. But like in reality I'm sure it's still something that's like hard to deal with. Like if if someone says something nasty on the internet, it's like you can't help but just let those things creep into your like psyche because we're human things hurt. Yes. Things hurt. And I have gotten so much better at it. I did a lot of things. Finally drew was like, we need to, we need to figure out a better balance about this isn't working.

00:23:27Edit But I have no notifications for Tiktok on my phone. So that was part of the problem at the time I had notifications on. So it was just constant scroll of everything. And it's hard not to just be in that this. Mm hmm You needed boundaries. 100%. And it's so much better than it was. But you're right every once in a while, something will get said. And it's especially when it's something that like I have worked so hard and so hands on with, it's hard not to take it personally and also like with such good intentions like you know what's the negative to cotton candy? Come on. I had no idea that we could, you know, there would be something that people could find to be upset about with cotton candy. So that's been a learning lesson two and 99% of people are so incredible and so supportive and all of that. But it's really hard. Like you said when you're human to not let that one comment stick out occasionally. It's like the negative comment like always seems to outweigh the thousands and thousands of positive comments and cheerleaders that you would have like supporting you and you know, just so excited about what you're doing.

00:24:36Edit Absolutely. I feel like for anyone listening who is a small business owner just getting started, they're going to listen to this and be like, oh yeah, but she started during the pandemic, it's not gonna happen for me. Like, you know, Tiktok saturated now feeling that like, oh, I've missed the boat kind of feeling what would your advice be to, you know, in progress, entrepreneurs who are early on in the journey and haven't gotten into the video content side of things yet. I feel like that is so easy to think that way and to get, especially because social media in the world now, it's, it's hard to play the comparison game. It's hard, it really is. I also think you've got to learn to quiet that noise and to just get started because the reality is the skill set of the video world. I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. And whether it's Tiktok or a new app that pops up, there's always going to be something new and bigger than better that's evolving and you can't predict it. People thought that Tiktok was going to go away and it hasn't and I don't think it's going to go away for a while.

00:25:41Edit But getting into that space now, it's not too late and just get started and it will help prepare you for whatever that next big thing is. And then maybe you catch that and you're in the right place at the right time. And also to part of being a business owner is finding what does make you different and what you bring to the table. And so there's no such thing as it being oversaturated. If what you are bringing to the table is truly unique and what it is about you that makes your company shine and what you have to offer then absolutely. The world needs to see that whether it's Tiktok instagram Youtube, whatever platform that you find you do well on man, you're such a great hype girl. Absolutely Though. I think, I mean it's, it's true. We all have something to offer. Mm hmm So true. Yes. So for anyone listening start today, Start tomorrow, start putting yourself out there. It's awkward. It's embarrassing. I'm trying to do it at the moment and it's tough.

00:26:44Edit But I'm going to persevere. I'm really gonna try and get to that like three videos a day. But God, it's a lot of content and it's it's that's the thing too, that I don't think people realize when it's like three videos a day and like, yeah, but you don't understand like that took me 8, 10 hours to create those three videos a day between. It's it's intimidating. I totally I understand that, but I do believe that it's worth it. And as far as the whole cringe e aspect goes, you've got to let that go because if anybody is making fun of you behind the scenes or making comments, hey, that's not your person. Anyways. And B. They are, you're gonna be the one that's laughing when you have the success behind you. So, you can just find a way to put it out there. I mean, I cringe at some of my old videos, but ultimately, I'm really glad that I posted because if not, yeah, look at where you are now a year and a half on your pretty happy about those cringe e videos, definitely. I will proudly share them now, Right?

00:27:47Edit So what's happened since, you know, you launched the online store and you switched and made the pivot to, I would say you're primarily probably an e commerce business now verse an events business. although I'm sure you still have the events arm of the business. But what's been the impact of switching and having kind of that viral Itty through Tiktok my life has changed in like truly every aspect from a personal standpoint, I am so much happier and more fulfilled in a way that I didn't even realize work issues or were not working well for me Previously, which is super interesting. But from a business standpoint, I'm now sitting in our new production facility in new offices. It's 2500 square feet of Barbie's dream house. There's just pink and glitter everywhere. It's incredibly good fun that I mean so fun. So we're moving in like officially here in the next two weeks, which is incredible. I went from one person to now a team of almost 20, I have a full time right hand gal whose name is Emma and she is incredible.

00:28:56Edit She has been by my side through all of the launching of the store and really helping me figure out and build a team, There is no book out there or manual that teaches you how to be a boss and let me tell you that has been like some of the most incredible learning experiences of growing as a human, growing as a business owner, as a leader. All of the things this past year has really taught me and to be able to provide a job for people is satisfying in a way that I was not expecting or prepared for. So that has been really cool and then just being able to ship all over the world and to share our cotton candy with so many people is I mean truly and it's truly an incredible thing to be able to experience and witness firsthand 100% and you play in a space that's like joyful, you know you it's playful, it's joyful, you you're around happy moments and special occasions and you're putting smiles on people's faces.

00:30:05Edit So I can just imagine how fulfilling that could be. Oh it's really such a gift. We so during like towards the end of our like severe lockdown here we were allowed to open up to do pickups in our parking lot essentially. So I was spinning cotton candy in these clear containers. It was not cute but people were driving from all over to come and pick up our cotton candy and I had someone in our parking lot literally crying which had me crying, talking about how this cotton candy meant so much to her and her family. It was a favorite treat of theirs and they splurged to get it all together and they had a really rough year and how this moment just brought them so much joy through eating cotton candy and I was just, I was not okay, I'm not okay now thinking about it but being able to bring that gift to people is I mean I get emotional just thinking about it and it is just cotton candy, I am aware of that, but it's pretty cool. No, but it's cotton candy stories, it's, it's moments of joy.

00:31:08Edit I totally get it. That's amazing, wow. Especially now, I feel like it even makes it a little more special. Absolutely. And I also think like now you're probably in a position where you're able to step back if you need to, you've got the support of a team that means that if you need to be out of the office or if you need to go on vacation or you have the family emergency, everything keep like keeps going, everything still runs. Yes, which is a, I mean, I can't even describe what that feels like for me and my family. I think when we first launched, when I first launched in March, I was working 20 hours a day for probably two months and when I finally got to the point where I could hire Emma on full time, the deep breath that I was able to take for the first time in what felt like forever was something I will truly never forget and to be able to say, okay, now I can focus on myself and my family just as much as the business was really neat. I bet I'm sure What is your key piece of advice for entrepreneurs coming into 2022.

00:32:15Edit Oh wow, I feel like I could talk about this all day, I feel like one thing that nobody and I think it's talked about, but I think it's natural for people to feel like you have to wait until it's perfect, whatever it is, whether it's the Tiktok video, it's the product, it's whatever it is that your specialty is, you want to wait until it's done exactly how you want it to be. And I think that that can be a huge detriment to people sometimes releasing things. Whether it's your first service, your website, your social media posts before it's perfect is the way to go. We released our cotton candy glitter bombs, which is what we're really known for. And it's our champagne cotton candy, you drop it into a glass of Prosecco champagne spray, whatever it dissolves, edible glitter flows out and the first round of packaging that we released wasn't perfect. And I learned so much through that that was then able to give me the keys and the information to make the perfect packaging.

00:33:19Edit So there's something to be said about just putting it out there and seeing what it goes, how it goes, what the feedback is, and to not get in your own way of that perfection that to be quite honest with you doesn't really exist anyways, but just giving yourself the permission to show up in whatever way works in that moment is I think really important to starting a business and to growing it. Yeah, I mean it's so funny that you mentioned this because literally yesterday I was saying on social media, it was like this quote that came from one of the guests on the show Michelle Runabout, she said don't let becoming who you want to become, wait, I'm going to read it to you because I'm going to muck it up. I just know you know when you go to say something and you're like, it's not that you're like it's so close, but it's also not exactly that. Yeah, exactly. She said the only way to get closer to becoming who you want to be is to let go of perfectionism and it's so true, done is better than perfect and just like just start, just get out there and get started and like it, it sounds so cliche, like the whole Nike just do it slogan But truly that's their slogan for a reason.

00:34:33Edit Just put something out there, just do it, just get started. And I also say to you will never regret putting yourself out there and doing it and trying but you will 100% not doing it, you'll regret not doing it. And so I think that first step is absolutely the hardest and the most important. Yes, that is so, so true Gosh, love that advice, Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode. We are testing out something new here for the next while and we're splitting up each episode into two parts, the main interview part and then the six quick questions part to make them easier to listen to. So That's part one done, tune into part two To hear the six quick questions.

So question number one is what's your, why? Why are you doing what you're doing? The what we just talked about is being able to bring people joy and their happiest moments and really small and creative ways is absolutely why the long hours and the money and the time and the stress and the tears and the hard work are all worth it to be able to bring people that happiness in a way that they can't really get anywhere else is absolutely why we do it.

00:01:14Edit Amazing. Question number two is what has been the number one marketing moment so far? And you can't say Tiktok in general. I think that one of the things where I was like, oh wow, like people actually care about this is without a publicist, without helping anybody, a writer from business insider reached out and said, I've been following you on Tiktok. So, to talk adjacent, I guess, and I really want to write your story. And that was a moment for me that I was like, wow, you can't pay for this type of exposure. You can't just have people kind of sit up and lean in into notice what I was doing was huge personally and for the business. Yeah. And I guess this also goes to show like, you know, had you have not put yourself out there, that opportunity wouldn't come. I mean, maybe it would have, but the thing to remember is like when you're putting out a video on instagram or you're putting out a video on Tiktok, the buyers from, you know, stock is that you want to be stocked at their on these platforms to right there looking journalists, reporters there on these platforms, browsing, they're looking for things to be inspired by and things to write about.

00:02:28Edit So, you know, Yes, it will help your like, sales and all that kind of thing. But you should post because people are watching and it only takes one. You don't even need to have a following of one million followers. You you might have 5000 followers, but it only takes someone to discover your video. Absolutely. It could be any, I mean, you could have 100 views, but you don't know who those 100 people are. Absolutely. Question # three is what's your go to business resource in the form of book, podcast or newsletter. Oh, wow, this may be kind of a cheating answer. So I'm sorry if that's the case, but when you own a business Google is 100% your best friend. I can't tell you how many times a day I google the answer to something because I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't have a business background at at all, even close to it. But I think from a looking up to people are getting business advice. I really love to look up to other female entrepreneurs. There's baked by melissa.

00:03:30Edit I'm not sure if you know who she is, but she's really big in new york and she does these tiny cupcakes that they shipped everywhere. She's also a handmade business. So I really look up to her and her instagram and what she's doing, Jeni britton who owns Jeni's ice cream again very similar. She has some of the most inspirational, just little blurbs that she shares throughout the day that are really incredible. So I find that following like minded people and people that inspired me on social media, it pops up on my feet and it really makes my day and it's not something that I'm searching out for necessarily, but it has even a bigger impact because it comes to me organically mm that's so cool. I'm gonna look them both up and check out their content? Question number four is how do you win the day. What are your am or PM rituals and habits that keep you feeling happy and motivated and successful? I love at the end of the day, at the workday, really having kind of a tally of things that, hey, this is what we needed to get done, which we do a to do list in the morning and here's what we hit and really kind of setting up for that next day and feeling like it was a success.

00:04:37Edit Hey, we hit this number of cotton candy that we needed to get spun. We made that goal. This was the content that I needed to film. These are the meetings that I had to have and really just in a lightweight, keeping track of all of that, but also being flexible within it more than anything. For me, it has to feel successful more than kind of checking things off if that makes sense. So like yesterday for example, we ended the workday with high school musical dance party, which happens around here pretty frequently and yeah, it's a fun place to work. I'm not gonna lie. And while that may have felt like a weird way to end the day or we posted about it on instagram, People probably like, do they even work? And we do, we work hard. We have fun a lot too, but I walked away from yesterday feeling like it was a success even though we didn't maybe necessarily produce cotton candy yesterday, we absolutely hit those check marks, how to dance party and it felt like we got everything done that we needed to. That is so fun. I hope everyone wants to come and work for you.

00:05:38Edit That sounds amazing. Question Number five is what's the worst money you've ever spent in the business? Oh my goodness. I feel like I could have a long list of this, especially with the online store. It we spent so much money on packaging and shipper boxes and all of that. I spent, I mean an astronomical amount of money. It was Like $40,000 on getting branded shipping boxes that I like all in through all the kind of trial and air and all of that to which they're beautiful. They're pink striped and emerald green on the inside. However, when they arrived at your front door, they're brown and beat up because they're shipped to you. So it's not like they arrived in this beautiful condition and they had so much ink on them that they don't stay sealed because the adhesive doesn't stick to the saturated cardboard or corrugated cardboard.

00:06:40Edit So that was a very expensive mistake. We did eventually find an adhesive that would work through a lot of trial and air, but we are wrapping up using those boxes and then having to go a different direction, definitely not getting those reprinted because it was so expensive and B it wasn't what we thought it was going to be too. Oh yeah, wow, that's crazy. That's a that's a big one. Yes, it could it could have been worse. But it was it was a big one. Yeah, that's a big one. This kind of blends into this question. So maybe you will have a different ends of it. Maybe not. Question number six is what's been a major fail that you can share and like how you dealt with it, definitely our glitter bomb packaging, the original one that we had. So actually I have the one right now in front of me. This is what we ended up with. There are these beautiful green pouches that we heat seal. They're great. The original packaging were these plastic jars and the thought behind that was that it really stayed fresh. We could control all of that.

00:07:42Edit Except for the fact that when summer came around, people were begging us for these glitter bombs. And we weren't able to test it in the summer because of when the shop ended up opening and the plastic would change size depending on where it was being shipped in the country. So it was being shipped somewhere warmer. The cotton candy was disintegrating inside of these plastic jars. And so for fourth of july I had just had surgery. It was Emma's like second full week here full time and we came in and all of our glitter bombs for the fourth of july had melted at the time. We didn't understand why or what was going on with them. We had to remake all of them, send them out. We had to refund a lot of money. We had to make it right and we did. But that was definitely a really big failure in the very beginning. And it took a lot of time to make that right and to develop the right packaging and to learn from all of that, but not something we were definitely expecting after all of the research and time that we put into choosing that specific packaging to begin with.

00:08:45Edit Ooh, that's a tough one. Holy Moly Yes, so definitely I feel for you that that's that's crazy. Crazy stuff we talked about that day often around here and how we never want to relive it. That's for sure. Yeah, I bet Emily thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today and share your journey. I have loved chatting with you and what you're building and I'm so excited to see what comes next. Thank you so much for having me.