From Wedding Planner to Decor Mogul: Julie's Journey with Slate Displays (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: We were easily making about $20,000 in a month and having no employees, just, you know, providing what we do the best, the décor. Hi, you guys, Julie here with DécorLab, and in this video, I would love to share with you my story and how I started with the event décor business. I started back in 2015. I worked for a venue as a day off coordinator for many, many weddings. We had about three events a week, and we had about 100 events in the year, and I'm talking about just weddings, not including other corporate events. So worked a lot of hours, loved aspect of just being in a lot of people's celebrations, doesn't matter what they're celebrating. And I realized that I love doing it so much, why wouldn't I start my own thing? So I went online and applied for a wedding planning course, graduated with honor, paid and learned big fat nothing. It took me some time to get on my feet, finding clients, finding my pricing, finding people to work with, learning how to work with people because I had no idea because they don't teach you that in school. I wish they did, but they don't. They don't teach you how to collaborate with venues. They don't teach you how to promote yourself and how to do your marketing. They just teach you some logistical stuff that you can figure out, and that doesn't work all the time. It works case to case scenario. So it took me some time to figure it out, and I started rolling until one of my brides asked me to find a vendor who makes the marquee ladders. Back then, that was late 2016, and I didn't have a vendor here. We're in the United States on the East Coast, so there was no vendor back then. They were very hot back then in England and very popular. There were a lot of vendors who were doing it, but here, unfortunately, there was no one. We sat down and decided to try to make them ourselves. Our first marquee love ladder that my bride wanted took us about three months to create, a lot of figuring out, and we only had a jigsaw and a plastic table from Walmart, a lot of tries and tools and different materials that we put into it, but we made it look gorgeous because if I'm doing something, it's got to look good. So after that first laugh, I realized how much I like the aspect of the just decorations, creating decorations, offering those decorations to our clients, and this is how we added a decor aspect to my planning services. So I did it for another year, actually, almost two years, offered wedding planning services, added decor services as an additional service. So we did that for a little bit, struggling here and there. I've had my first son during that time, so I did step away from the business for a little bit. Thankfully, being self-employed allows you to do that. But then coming back to the full force, trying to get new clients and start doing more collaborations, I realized that I don't want to do the wedding planning anymore. I want to do decor. I love the decor aspect of it. I wanted to build a bigger inventory I want to create. And this is how Slate Displays were born. This is my decor company that I started in June, and we were fully booked by September. Slate Displays officially started, launched in June 2019. We had a very busy fall and very busy winter. Pre-pandemic, we were easily making about $20,000 in a month and having no employees, just providing what we do the best, the decor. And then pandemic happened. You would think the pandemic would kill the business. It did kill a lot of businesses, not Slate Displays. We were striving during pandemic. We actually gained a lot of very credible clients like Amazon. We worked with bigger companies like Moles and Steams just because they wanted to be out there and they wanted to have a cool display that will just scream for a cool social media post. This is how we survived through 2020. And today, I have so many decorators reaching out to me and asking me, how did you guys do this? How did you get to where you are today? How do you do a certain aspect of this or that? Because at this point, we have a very large inventory of different decorations. We're making gorgeous custom displays and our clients from all over the area, I want to even say East Coast, are reaching out to us because they want us to do their work. And we can teach you how to do that too with DecorLab. I grew my own business pre-pandemic and during pandemic, and I can help you to grow your own brand. We created the DecorLab School just for that, to help decorators and beginners just like yourself to get on their feet, to get comfortable, to grow their brand, to get more clients and to create awesome displays. Are you ready to join? Click on the link in the description and we'll be happy to share with you all the information we have. And I will see you in the next video.