Grace & Lace
SUMMARY
As it often does, necessity was where the boot socks, leg warmers, and women’s apparel products of Grace & Lace began. Now they’ve jumped from just a few employees to a whole team to help them ship their goods across the world.
WHERE THEY SELL
GraceandLace.com
From where did the idea to create lace boot socks (and then other clothing articles) come?
My wife had an inspiration to create a cute, frilly boot sock and set out to do so. It took her about 8 hours of slaving away on the sewing machine and what’s hilarious is when she finished she told me, “I will never make another one of those again!!!” I was fine with that notion. We weren’t looking to start a company and had no idea it would soon be boot socks, leg warmers and women’s apparel. When Melissa wore her “pain in the rear” creation people would flock to her, asking if she’d make them a pair. Seeing this, I thought we might just have something but we had no idea about the journey to come. An accidental company was born and we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
What has it been like since going on Shark Tank? Have there been any particular struggles you’ve had to overcome?
Shark Tank was incredible. It was such an honor to be on the show and interact with business titans! Things absolutely exploded. We did a million in sales within 5 days of airing, which was insane! It was off the chart exciting BUT at the same time it wasn’t easy. We had serious growing pains…going from 6 part time, stay-at-home moms to over 30 people working with us in the snap of a finger presented plenty of challenges and sleepless nights. We thought we were busy with 150 orders/day but that jumped to over 2000 orders per day. Looking back it was a complete fog and was pretty messy. Logistics, shipping, technology, manufacturing, production, etc etc, you name it we were learning and at a break neck speed. Thank God we had some incredible people working with us (including several of the fine folks at ShipStation)… and still do. I can’t explain how much I thank God for bringing us absolutely amazing people to work with. We love our staff and words can’t describe how thankful we are for them! Without these priceless people, Shark Tank may have overwhelmed us right out of business.
How has ShipStation helped you with your business?
ShipStation is a key piece of our infrastructure and it has been for quite a while. Before ShipStation, we were spending so much time on every order: clicking through multiple interfaces and printing labels one-by-one. Such a pain! ShipStation not only helped us ship more packages with less effort and in less time, but they helped us understand shipping processes that work for us and really partnered with us at a key time in growth with the massive exposure from Shark Tank. We are so grateful for not only the software, but the team and support behind it.
What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?
Do I have to pick just one? Fine. ReportsAndFilters. :) We rely on ShipStation reports to analyze the entirety of our business, since all sales channels eventually make their way into our ShipStation account. Filters is a close second, in terms of our favorites. That allows us to optimize shipping in batches as well as do all sorts of nifty things to increase our number of shipments going out the door every day.
We are so grateful for not only [ShipStation's] software, but the team and support behind it.
"With ShipStation, I’m able to create 500 labels in less than a few minutes and get beauty in the hands of women who are battling cancer so much quicker. It allows me to put so much more time into the things that are really valuable to the Stay Beautiful Foundation and helps us grow and scale."
"ShipStation integrates seamlessly into all new and emerging marketplaces. It allows us to focus less on shipping, and more on generating revenue for our clients."
"ShipStation and UPS allows us to scale and fulfill with the same quality as billion-dollar companies."
"ShipStation has one simple dashboard with all of our shipping needs. We can compare rates across different carriers, understand delivery time frames, and quote customers expedited shipping."
"I appreciate how intuitive and practical ShipStation's features are when processing delivery labels. It's really fast and efficient!"
"I’ve learned so much with ShipStation, it is seriously amazing. I tell everybody about how it will change your business and how efficiently you can run everything."