Grace & Lace

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.