Have you ever had a shopping trip at the mall that sounds like this?
"Ah, this dress is so cute! Oh wait, that's way too short. Darn."
"Are you kidding, I love this fabric! Oh, shoot. Huge cutout hole in the back."
"Ugh, I love the look of this dress so much. But why did they have to make it so revealing?"
This was me every time I shopped for anything here in Utah.
I HATED shopping!
As a devoted Christian, I couldn't understand why none of the big sellers made dresses for girls like me. Like, am I really the only one who cares about modesty? My problem was frustrating, and in a weird way, isolating too.
One day I was venting about this to my husband Ryan and he said something that stopped me in my tracks.
"You have such a good fashion sense, and you've complained about a lack of flattering, modest dresses for years. What if we just... made our own dresses? I bet there are other women out there like you who don't want to feel like they have to choose between living their standards and feeling cute."
As soon as he said it, I knew it's what I wanted to do.
Designing the Dresses
So we went online and started talking to clothing manufacturers. Even though I had no experience in the fashion industry and I didn't even know the basics of sewing, I started with the one thing I did know:
Drawing.
I found some pictures of those frustratingly cute but low-coverage dresses, and I got to work drafting up my own versions. I broke out the measuring tape, and Ryan helped me write down how long the sleeves and bodice should be and where everything should lie. I chose my preferred fabrics.
Ryan and I shopped our first three designs to different manufacturers until we found 5 who had reasonable prices, high-quality fabrics, and seemed up to the challenge. We paid them each $100 to make us a sample.
It took us more than a year of back-and-forth over these samples to choose our supplier and get the first batch of dresses fully ready to go. But, through it all, we built trust with one of the suppliers, and pretty soon we felt really good. When the invoice came from someone asking for more money from us than we had ever paid for anything, we looked at each other in the eyes and said, "I guess we go for it?"
But first, we decided to pray. We got on our knees and said,
"Heavenly Father, we think we have a really cool idea here. We want to bless your children. We want to create a community of faith-based women who support each other, love and obey you, and feel confident and beautiful while doing it. Can you please help us make this business a success?"
We felt a strong answer that God was on board. And so we kissed our savings goodbye and ordered 1200 dresses from someone we had never met.
The Big Launch
The dresses came a couple of months later, and on August 22, 2022 we decided to hit "publish" on our Shopify store. We had relentlessly pursued feedback and built potential customer lists, and we were sure God was going to make this a grand success!
But...
God had other plans.
We waited all morning and afternoon for the first sale. None came. At night, we sat back down at our Shopify store again and tried to figure out if we hadn't dialed in the settings right or maybe something was wrong with our card intake. Were our customers able to access the website? What could possibly be wrong?
Unfortunately, everything was working fine. Through tears, we eventually came to accept that no one wanted our dresses.
Not yet, at least.
We were just a brand new website with slightly too expensive and too vanilla dresses. We had no idea how much more there was too learn. We needed natural fabrics. We needed pockets. We needed more feedback.
It would be another three weeks before we had the first "Cha-ching!" notification alerting us that someone had bought a dress.
And it would be another 3 grueling years before we ever turned a profit. If we could have returned the dresses and gotten our money back, I think we would have done that a long time ago, haha. But I'm glad we didn't have that option. Our failure taught us to be tougher. Smarter. Wiser. Better listeners to what our customers really wanted. And we exercised faith that God would still make this a success like we thought he would.
Improving Poet Dresses, One Tweak at a Time
I got better at designing dresses, and Ryan got better at marketing them. We have had 1000 little breakthroughs along the way. Fast forward to today, and now we sell 100s of dresses every month, we partner with dozens of incredible influencers and affiliates, and we frequently sell out of dresses faster than we can even get them restocked!
What a blessing.
God is good. He has been good to me and I know he will be good to you. If you're here reading this right now, thank you. Thank you for being part of our faith-filled community. On your walk of faith, motherhood, or wherever you're at, we hope we can add some light and some cute dresses to your journey.
Love, Kat XOXO