KatieWaltman.com

Your sister’s designs are stunning; how did the business of crafting jewelry begin?

John: Katie was introduced to making jewelry by our grandma, who took her to bead shows and showed her how to make jewelry for herself. It became more than a hobby when people started asking where she got the jewelry she was wearing, and she started doing home shows and eventually selling in a few local shops.

Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs?

Confucius said, “It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.” Entrepreneurs often get impatient when they don’t see amazing growth immediately. We feel that persistence is one of the keys to business success, and would encourage others to keep working toward their goals.

Luckily for us, ShipStation has really allowed us to speed up our processes and get more done with less.

Have there been any particular hurdles that you’ve had to overcome? If so, how did you?

After Katie and I partnered up in 2010, we started to grow more aggressively, and that put a strain on our cash flows. Rather than taking on any outside funding, we put off taking paychecks for almost a year and brought in family members to help make the jewelry as sales were increasing. This experience has contributed to our confidence that we can be successful if we are persistent, and has given us a preference for natural growth of the company.

How has ShipStation helped you with your business?

We did ecommerce the hard way for too long. ShipStation dramatically cut down the time from receiving an order to getting it shipped out, and keeps us totally organized with a centralized record of our orders from all different channels. We are now able to give our growing customer base a higher level of service than we ever did before.

What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?

We sell jewelry on KatieWaltman.com and ties on WaltmanCo.com. For each of these products, we also have a few other online channels that we use to sell, and ShipStation keeps it all organized for us.

ShipStation gives us the freedom to try new sales channels knowing that there will be zero complications with shipping. We have also been able to implement free shipping & returns because ShipStation makes everything easy. Thanks for everything, ShipStation!