The Real Retail Apocalypse | The Boutique Summit 2017 with Ashley Alderson

I just have to say, kind of standing here at the end of the day, like the last speaker of the day, I really do feel like there's this huge weight off our shoulders. But it's kind of like a wedding. You know, you, like, plan for so long to put this together, and then it gets here and it goes so fast. But it's been beyond magical. I am so blown away at you guys. Like, there's 300 of you here. Look at what you guys built. You guys did this. So cool. Not only was it fun and it was educational, but I'm here to say there has never been a more exciting time in retail, in specialty retail, in the boutique industry than today. Would you agree? You guys did this. That's so cool. Yes. So, Laura Benson, I love her. I love that she got up here and talked about not comparing yourself to others and to owning your own journey. And to Becca Clark talking about her own journey and just laying it all out there and being real and talking about where you start and where you can go when you're yourself. And again, Kelsey and Randa talking about the ups and the downs and how we can not only survive, but we can thrive when we're brave enough to ask ourselves some hard questions. They're not easy questions to ask and to evolve with the changing market conditions. Right. And there's only a couple changes happening in the marketplace at the moment. Can we all just say this thing called the retail apocalypse, like this big, scary monster that everybody talks about? So I wanted to take this time to do two quick things here at the end of the day. And the first thing was I just want to have some real talk for a minute. Let's talk about this retail apocalypse and what does it actually mean for our industry and these challenges that people keep telling us that we're going to have. How do we take those challenges and make them opportunities? And I've got four key strategies that I want to share with you today. Today. And then the second thing I want to do today is I just want to share. I'm going to get this out of my way. I just want to share our vision with you. Because I feel like what we've built in the last two days, what you guys have built, is not just a bigger vision for the hub, but the bigger vision for our industry as a whole and where we're going. So I want to get into that. A little bit of meat and potatoes as well. So this retail apocalypse, I love this graphic, by the way. It's this monster, right, that the Media keeps telling us they're eating stores like Nasty Gal and Macy's and Sears and Payless and Vanity. We could go on and on. What are they estimated to close about 8,600 stores across the US today. But that's all we hear in the media is negativity, right? Is scared the new norm in society? Can I get an amen? That's all we hear. Where's the journalists that are actually digging up the facts? Can I just do my best Trump impression for a second? We're here to make boutiques great again. It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be wonderful. Everybody's doing it. That was a little too Texas, I think, for a Trump accent. Kind of sucked at that one. But I'm pretty sure that you guys are here to prove that there's a whole lot more going on than what the media is letting on. Amen. Yes. So what do the facts actually say? That's what I want to look at. So the facts actually tell us the GDP is on the rise, right? For eight years since the recession. Unemployment's low, gas prices are low. And yes, we are in Texas. That means oil prices are low. But coming from North Dakota in the middle of an oil boom, when I saw people renting a little like ice fishing shack, you know, like that you take out on the water to sleep three people for eight grand a month, like we knew that wasn't sustainable. So something was going to happen to oil prices. But recently Forbes and other magazines have reported that retail spending is up 4.1% in the first quarter quarter of 2017 over 2016. So we are definitely seeing an increase. People are certainly spending, but they're spending in a different way than the media is catching onto. So we know that the stores that are stagnant, the ones that are closing, the ones that don't know their ideal customer, they're spending too much money, they're too big and slow to change. Those are the ones that are going down, right? The ones that haven't kept up with the times. But the stores that are nimble and act like stuff startups, these niche stores, those are the ones that are on the rise and we're seeing them open stores faster and faster. The stores that provide a real experience, whether it's boutique or big box, those are the stores that are growing. And then there's the boutiques, right? There's the boutiques, there's Amazon and then there's the boutiques. Let's talk about Amazon. Amazon in the last couple of Years. They went from 17 billion to 80 billion since 2010. And while a lot of people think about Amazon, they think about e commerce. But what is Amazon? It's way more than e commerce. There's Amazon Go that's now coming offline and offering this in store experience. There's these other traditional e commerce brands like Amazon Rent the Runway, Birchbox, Warby Parker, all of these stores that are coming offline and giving customers a true Omnichannel experience. Where you can shop online, you can also shop in. That's the trend that we're seeing and how that relates. Let me just go back to Omnichannel for just a second. It's where online experiences may drive in store sales and where in store experiences may drive online sales. Does that make sense? Everyone knows Omnichannel, so this revolution is happening to boutiques too. So Becca talked about being online first and then opening a storefront. We saw Pink Lily here a couple weeks ago open their first retail storefront. We saw the same with the red dress. Just talking about some big ones, Philly flair. Same thing. Being online and then moving into a storefront. Does it mean that one or the other has to lead the way? No, it means they can feed off of one another. Right. You have to pick what works best for your brand. So the way that I see it is this is not the retail apocalypse, right? This is the evolution of retail. This is what I wish the media would cover. It's not an apocalypse, it's just an evolution. And as I stand here and I look at you, this is your opportunity. This is your guys opportunity in this market. So the question is, how do you capitalize on it? What do you have to do to move forward and grow your business? To capitalize? And the first thing and the thing that every speaker has echoed up here is you have to ask yourself the hard questions, the uncomfortable questions. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable and you have to learn to ask yourself some questions. So I wanted to share this little story with you and some of you will maybe appreciate this. I'm from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, currently from North Dakota originally. This is the home of Leine and Kugel's beer. Summer Shandy, anyone? Yeah. Okay, so I mean, why share a beer story? It's totally normal. One of the Leinenkugel grandkids is even in my daughter's first grade class. So like birthday parties and field trips at the brewery, totally normal in the first grade. So I heard this story not too long ago and I thought, man, it's relevant to what we're talking about, because this story is all about how you ask yourself hard questions. So the story goes, maybe it wasn't Leinenkugel's. We'll just pretend it was. But it was probably some other brewery not near as good as Leinenkugel. So this is probably Busch Light, Sennheiser Busch. So when they first. The story is when they first implemented their canning line, because most breweries start in bottles or they start in kegs. When this brewery several years ago first implemented their canning line, they had this huge community celebration to commemorate this new opportunity, because they brought in a canning line so the brewery could finally sell to supermarkets. So huge growth. And typically these breweries are in small towns. They employ a lot of people. So this community celebration was like, rah, rah. This is awesome, right? So they have beer and ice cream at this celebration, and they go well together. So these people were all kind of spread out through the celebration, chatting. And off in the corner was three gentlemen, and they were all kind of hunched over, grumbling with one another. So one of the gentlemen was the current production or the. I'm sorry, the current delivery manager for the brewery. And the other two gentlemen were two men that had had his post previously. One had recently retired, and then one had retired like a decade ago. But he was still there for the beer and ice cream, of course. So they're grumbling. And the current production or delivery manager, he keeps saying, man, this canning line, this is going to send us out of business. This is really going to bring morale down in the brewery, because how are we going to keep up with this? We just got way too much on our plate. Our delivery schedule is crazy as it is. And I don't understand why it is this way in the first place. Because on Mondays and Tuesdays, we have to have these long deliveries. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, we have kind of shorter deliveries, but we can only do these short little local deliveries to the supermarkets on Fridays. It doesn't make any sense. Like, our guys are just going to go crazy. The second guy that recently retired, he agrees, and he's upset. He's like, you know, I don't understand why it is that way. It's so frustrating. This really is going to be hard for the brewery to implement. Well, finally, the third old man, and he's, you know, the oldest of the three, and he just kind of smiles and sips his beer. And finally when they quit grumbling long enough, he says, it was the horses, it was the horses. In World War II, when we had fuel rationing and we took away the trucks, we brought back the horses. The horses were well rested after the weekend. So we had long deliveries on Mondays and Tuesdays. We had shorter deliveries on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and then the horses were wiped out. So we only had these short little stops on Fridays. Makes sense, right? So the first two men were speechless. They just sat there and they drank their beer. Because up until that point, no one had ever questioned why things were the way they were or dared to change it. They just wanted to grumble about it. Does this sound familiar? Does anyone live in a community with, like a good old boys club? Can I just, like, add that in there? Sometimes that tends to happen. But I think the bigger point here is what hard questions are you not asking? It seems pretty obvious to all of us, right? Like, why not just change the schedule? But sometimes we can't see the forest through the trees. We can't see what's happening right in front of us in our businesses. So what I want to do is invite you to ask yourself these hard questions, but I also want to walk you through four key areas that I see people will tell you is a challenge, but you can use as an opportunity. So we're going to go through each one of these. So don't feel like you've got to scramble quite yet. The first one I talk about, the first one I want to talk about with you is customer experience. So, customer experience. The experts will all tell you that millennials and Gen Z all seek experience over the traditional transaction. So whether it's dining or shopping or play, the experience in which the product is delivered or the experience in which the product is sought after is more important than the product itself. Does that sound familiar? Hence why cheaper isn't always better, right? Just because you're cheap doesn't mean you're going to sell it. It's the experience that people want. So this is exactly why boutiques got started in the first place. This is your jam, you guys. This is where boutiques came from. Because people could come in your store and you could offer something that nobody else could. And that's what these two generations are really looking for. So a couple of questions that you can ask yourself in your own business here that can help you uncover a better customer experience. So is it through your staff? Is it through your upfront and customer centric policies, including easy returns? Are you making it easy or are you starting a fight with your customers? It's probably a good question to have as we look at our return policies and think about Zappos, go Google Zappos. When you see that, is it in store events that we could and should be offering or is it pop up shops that we could and should be offering? Is it additional product experience pairings that we could offer such as candy bars, coffee bars, blow dry bars, spa collaborations in store pop ups with complementing vendors like Etsy shops? Is it music? Is it cross promotions with similar businesses? If you're on a small town main street, are you collaborating with the store next door, the flower shop, the coffee shop, heck the tire store, and putting your products in with one another and sending traffic two directions? How can you look at what's around you and create a unique experience? Is it your merchandising? Is it the scent? Is it the sound? What is it that's going to set you apart, right? What is it that's going to make your customer feel unique, surprised or special, or leave a lasting impression they will never forget you for? And going back to Zappos, I just read the Zappos. The founders of Zappos wrote a book. I listened to it on Audible because I can't sit down long enough to read. It was amazing. Highly recommend you go get that one because it's all about the experience for them in fact. So side note, you can actually go to the Zappos customer helpline and order a pizza. People have tried it and their customer service is so good that they've gotten people pizza because they're all about making the customer happy. And then the customers come back again and again and again because they can't believe they're being treated so well. Now I'm not saying you gotta order your customer's pizza, but what is it that you're doing that leaves a memory with your customer? Right? The second opportunity that I see is an on demand society. Now a lot of people will like say this is a terrible thing, but hey, we see something, we love something, we want something, we buy it. Hello Amazon. Hello Alexa. Right? We want it right like this. Now we may see that as a challenge, but really I see it as an opportunity. So a quick little stat. Let's just talk about websites for a second. Have you guys really walked through your website or walked through if you're doing comment selling and thought about do I make this as easy as possible for my customer to purchase something? Is my site optimized for like a one or two click checkout or do they have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get there? Are you just posting something but not offering any call to action? And you just expect they're going to show up on your website and find that product that you posted about, but you're not going to give them any directions. Make sense? And one thing that we do in boutique bootcamp is we send customer surveys. We try to really understand a lot about each of our clients, customers. And a little stat for you, over 80% of the survey respondents, so these are customers, respond through those surveys that their preferred shopping method is through a website checkout. Kind of shocking. Like a lot of people want to shop on a website. Thank you, Amazon, because they've trained our customers. Right. But this is the cool. Well, not cool. This is kind of the sad part, actually. I see a lot of boutiques, when they first then create a website, they just expect like, I've got it and now they're going to come, I'm going to build it and then they're going to come. Kevin Costner lied. That does not work like that. If you build it, they do not come. You have to train your customers. So this on demand society, the opportunity for you is how do you train your customers? How do you use consistency and messaging to train your customers to shop with you in the easiest method for both them and for you? Right? Yeah, the Amazon going back to Amazon. Sometimes we look at Amazon as such an animal. Like it's so big we can't compete with Amazon. Right. Does anyone ever feel like that? I kind of find this to be blown because if I think about the tools that Amazon uses to market to their customers, each of you have those same tools and opportunities available to you. So whether it's through your shipping policies, through your customer centric returns, through your fast turnarounds, through behavior targeting, through great interest targeting, like we were talking about Shoelace. Amazon's probably the first one I feel like I ever was retargeted by. Like, you go there and then that little product would follow you around everywhere. You guys can do that exact same thing. You can send smart email campaigns to segmented lists just like Amazon can. All of those omnichannel experiences that we were talking about, like Amazon's doing, you can do the exact same thing. We have all of the tools Amazon does at our disposal, but it's up to us if we decide to use them or not. Right? It doesn't have to be overwhelming. You just pick one, you own it, and then you move on to the next one. But there's all kinds of opportunity there for this on demand society. The third thing, and I love this, I think I've mentioned this a couple times in the last two days. This is social proof. So social proof. Some people are scared of social media, some people run crazy with social media. And we can either get frustrated by the algorithms and the way things change, or we can just own them and use them as an opportunity. So the post types, advertising methods, we know all those things are going to constantly change. But the cool part about social proof is that if your friend says that she has something and she loves it, you're going to want it and you're going to love it too. But if your friend says something is terrible and it sucks, you're going to believe it and you're never going to go do business. There's Right. So how is it that we're using this herd animal mentality to our advantage? And I think our social media panel did a good job of talking about that. How do we get our customers to be on our side and help spread that message? How do we deliver happiness and own that as a marketing method? How do we deliver happiness as a marketing method? One way to do that is getting our customers to take selfies in our clothes. Right. And you may have to plant the first couple that you get to do that, but that's okay. You may have them leaving reviews on your Facebook page, you may have them doing check ins which we talked about. You can actually run contests or you can give a 5% discount at checkout if someone checks into your store. Super easy to do just to have them check in. If you have a pop up shop or if you have an online store. And even if you have an online store, can I just like drop this little tidbit? And you don't have an address that you want to share. You can still leave a city and a but leave the actual physical address off. That way your online store starts to show up in more local searches. And as we hear like local's becoming more important, that's like a quick little thing that you can do to show up to more people. So the social proof, the other thing that you can do that's a cool tool is using this share capacity on Facebook, enticing your customers to use referral codes, refer a friend, that type of thing to come back to your stores. There's all kinds of apps out there to get people to refer you to someone else and then to get both of you a discount at the same time. Let's just use sticker mule as an example. How many of you have seen the sticker mule referral codes that get shared in the boutique hub all the time. A lot of you, you have a great experience and you want to share it. So social proof is so crucial to your business. There's a cool stat that I just think this is so amazing. If we really own it, it's that 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of our lists. Let me repeat that 80% of our revenue comes From 20% of our list. So are we, like, herding cats out there and if we target everyone, we reach no one, or are we really owning who our best customers are and who those repeat customers are and we get them back in our door? Are we owning the experience that we're giving other people so they refer their friends to our store? This social proof thing is going to become more and more important on social media as we go forward. All right, opportunity number four. And this is like beating a dead horse. Like, I think I say this all the time to you guys, and that's authenticity, right? Especially with the rise of video. Authenticity is just crucial to our businesses. How often have you guys heard a customer say, oh, I know the owner. I know the. And maybe it's, can I get a discount? I know the owner. You guys hear that. It's because people long to be connected to someone. They long to be connected to you, and they think it's crazy cool that they have this authentic connection. The more that you share that with your customers on social media, that connection, the more they're going to continue to come back to you. Do you feel like that's been. Like. There's one word from the whole boutique summit. Do you think this is the word we've heard the most? Yeah, authenticity. So the underlying idea here is how do you share just enough of your real life that it keeps people coming back to more? And I like. I think it's kind of funny, I'll say. This whole idea that everybody likes a little bit of a shit show sometimes because it makes us feel like we're not the only ones that have it. That's why I love the Grigsby's Girls, because they, like, coined this when we were in boot camp. Everybody likes it. That's why reality TV is so big. Everyone wants to see Kim Kardashian do the ugly cry. Why is that right now? Does that mean. Does being authentic mean that you guys have to be a complete train wreck on social media? No, you don't have to do that. Just share enough of your life. But not just the highlight reel of Your life, it's okay to be vulnerable, too. Like these guys all said, if you guys have challenges or if you're having a bad day, you need some help or support from your community, a lot of times they'll love and respect you even more for just being yourself and just putting it out there, because then they can relate to it too. Authenticity is just so, so key. The thing that I love the most about this authenticity thing, and specifically about Facebook groups, because that's, like, my favorite channel, is the opportunity that we have to build a community, not a sales channel like Laura was talking about. Gary Vee. Gary Vee has the book. Jab, jab, jab, right hook, soft sell, soft sell, soft sell, hard sell, right? Build a community with your soft sells. And then once you have the community, then you come in and you ask for the hard sell. And then your customers are going to come back again and again every time. So four challenges that we see or that society tells us are challenges, but we can definitely use these as an opportunity. So the question is, is it going to be an opportunity for you guys, or is it going to be an apocalypse for you guys? Right? It's the question. This is the hard question you need to ask yourself. And sure, on the sugar coat on top, you're like, yeah, this is an opportunity. But you may answer one way today, but your actions, what you do tomorrow, that is what's going to determine your future. So how do you take advantage of this? How do you make sure your actions tomorrow agree and coincide with the answer that you have today? Well, back to what I said at the very beginning. This, like, crazy word that my husband thinks is super funny. Accountability buddies, what's the best way that we can hold ourselves accountable? It's not just by our own doing, because I suck at holding myself accountable. But you guys have each other, right? You guys have a group. Whether you use the entire community at the hub or just a small part of the Hub, your accountabilibuddies are gonna determine your success or your failure as you go forward. So your parents probably. Your parents probably had a saying for this, and my parents definitely had a saying for this. In fact, I want to just tell you a little bit about my parents. I'll show you them in a minute. My dad would always say, like, he would think they would be smart sayings, but then he would wrap them in this, like, warped sense of sarcasm that he had. And I'm not going to share with you that part. I'll just share with you the good part. But he Would always say things like, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Right? How many times have we heard that? That's the hub, isn't it? And then my mom would always say, and teenager Ashley hated to hear this, but you are who you hang out with. Who has heard this saying from their parents, right? I've told my mom that same thing, like with the coffee crowd that she goes to. She's 74. And like, mom, you are who you hang out with. Careful what you do. This is my parents. So it's not what you know, but it's who you know. And sometimes I'm scared that they're my blood. My dad's no longer with us, but I shared this picture because we like to, like, dress up and have a good time. And so this is them as Aunt Bethany and Uncle Louis from Christmas Vacation, the movie. We had a family Christmas party and we all dressed up as the Griswolds. Like literally every character from the Griswolds. And my dad officially had a big hole burnt in the back of his jacket from a cigar, so he was legit. So the point of all this is, it is. It's not what you know, but it's who you know and you are who you hang out with. And that's what you guys have all been here to prove for the last three days. You are who you hang out with and you are what you've built together in the hub. So inside of these groups, I just have to say, like, again, reflecting and looking at who's here, I feel like online we almost should have made your name tags, your profile pictures so we could identify you easier. But the cool part about the community online is we know your hobbies. Like, we all know your kids names. We all know that there's people who aren't with us this week because they just had a baby or they're expecting to have a baby. Like, we all can think of those people, right? How many of you call your hub friends by first names to your husband? And then he's like, what are you talking about? Like, who are these fictional characters that you've never met in real life? Anybody? Yes. Men in the group. Do you hear me? Yes. So the hub connected us, but what started as a simple Facebook group has really grown to be so much more. It's so much more connection beyond just a job title, the daily realities of Facebook algorithms, and talking about shoplifters like, it's so much more than that. Because what you guys have the opportunity to do is to impact one another's lives. Like crying our eyelashes off here earlier. I feel like, thank God for that, right? Like, the speakers that are up here, they aren't just here to teach you about how to run your business, but they're here to impact some part of your life. That's why we built this community in the first place. That is our 100% true motivator. So what I want to do now is I just want to share with you a little bit about the vision of the hub, where we're going, and how you guys are such a huge part of it. So how this all started, a quick little recap for you, because I know some of you have been with us from the very beginning, and some of you are just brand new to the hub. So three years ago, after our youngest daughter, Jade was born, literally in my first week of maternity leave, we flipped the switch to turn on the very first version of the boutiquehub.com and this is what it looked like. It was just a simple online portal, an online shopping mall of boutiques that you could discover around the world. We didn't even have the whole business side yet. We just had Facebook groups. And it was simple, but we had an awful lot of hustle and it was all just turned on from. From the couch one day. But in what seems like a super fast but almost equally slow blur and lots of ups and downs and crazies and lessons and things along the way, our community has definitely grown. But the one thing that's never changed is the vision for where we're going. The idea that we started this whole community with, like, we're still on path with that, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So I want to show you what it looks like today. So the boutique hub today is two overlapping sides of the boutique industry. If you picture the two circles, the first side of our industry is the boutique style platform. And this is really where the hub all started. And I'll give you backstory in just a minute, but this is where consumers can come and find boutiques every single day through your profiles on the boutique hub. This is your profiles. This is our blog. This is our hot list that we do. This is our shop, the Best Boutiques Facebook group. The second piece, the pink piece, the boutique style platform or the boutique business platform is where the boutique industry connects. And I feel like we've truly just begun to build this side of the platform. This is obviously for boutique owners, for wholesale brands, manufacturers, bloggers, and service providers to come together. On a daily basis to collaborate and share ideas and share support. And this includes the business and marketing training, Boutique Boot Camp, our wholesale marketplace, our blogger directory, our classifieds page, events like the Boutique Boss dinners, the summit, and all the Facebook groups. And then we have a couple pieces right in the middle that really dabble in both sides, and that is our Boutique style team, which Jesse talked about and we talked about a little bit yesterday, our collaboration between boutiques and bloggers, and then also our NFR Style guide, which is going to be getting a new name and a beautiful new look before the NFR in Vegas this year. So now that we're. We're at this halfway point in 2017, I know, like you guys, I all set, I set goals at the beginning of the year. I'm sure you do too. And I feel like at the halfway point in 2017, we're just beginning, like we're building such a bigger, bigger future for 2018 and beyond. And in fact, there's one little piece that I want to share with you tonight at the banquet that I'm especially excited about, something that we're going to be launching in just a couple weeks that is an opportunity for every single one of you that, in my opinion, is the place where we can take Boutique Discovery to. To an entire new level to people that maybe haven't even shopped boutiques before, or maybe they've shopped just one boutique and they want to discover more. But that little tidbit is going to be coming later tonight. We also have several new collaborations we're excited to share with you guys from people outside of the Hub. Just like the speakers that we had on stage, whether it's expert boutique owners, expert e commerce gurus, marketing experts, people that are going to bring training into the Hub so you can get a free flavor of different people's ideas. And the last thing, this last little vision for the future is how would you guys feel about a summit in 2018? Yeah. Is that it? That's how you feel about a summit in 2018? Are you guys. Yes. So we're excited to announce what we have planned for that later tonight at the banquet, too. So together, what I see us building as a community is the go to place for Boutique Discovery and the voice of the boutique fashion industry. And you guys are the central piece of all of that. And without each of you, none of this would be possible. You guys are the Boutique hub. Like I told you before, the whole reason this business started was not just about building businesses, but this was about impacting lives. And I truly feel like impact is our driver, but boutiques are just our vehicle. So the last little tidbit I want to share with you today and I posted about this in the group is I don't like to talk about myself a whole lot. Like, I'm okay with getting up here and hosting, but if you ask me to tell you about me, I'll turn into Ricky Bobby and not know what to do with my hands. So I asked this question in the group. So just two quick things that you guys asked that I wanted to share with you. The first question that you guys asked just about me personally was, what led you to create this wild idea and follow through with it and. And why not start a boutique, but instead start the hub? So the answer is, I'm originally from North Dakota, about 80 miles from the middle of nowhere. And it was a great community. It was a small community, but North Dakota growing up had, like, zero boutiques. We had flower shops and we had the Buckle, but that was about it for boutiques. So I did work in retail. I worked in a flower shop, like, the entire time I grew up. I did work at the Buckle in college, and I probably hustled all of y' all for a commission. But it wasn't until I traveled. Like, having Katie up here is kind of fun. It wasn't until I traveled as Miss Rodeo America and got to travel the country that I really fell in love with boutiques, whether it was boutiques in big cities on downtowns, or whether it was boutiques at rodeos. When I finally started to discover boutiques, I was so hungry for them because I finally could have something that nobody else had. But when I would get back home to North Dakota, I could not find them anywhere. And at that time, Facebook was brand new. I was still in college. Mark Zuckerberg was definitely my very first friend on Facebook. Did they still do that? Is he still your first friend when you sign up on Facebook? I don't know. It was the dawn of Facebook, and that was the time. It was modern vintage boutique and the red dress boutique. Giddy up. Glamour, Southern jewels. They were all brand new on social media, but there was no business pages. So I had this dream at that time to build an online shopping mall where people like me could finally come and discover these cool stores, even if we lived in remote places like North Dakota. But what happened next was I married my husband and I moved to another town where I could work in economic development. So for seven years, I worked as an executive director of an economic Development corporation, and I ran a small business development center. And I loved working with business owners. I worked with everybody from retailers to service providers to primary sector to politicians, you name it. But what really inspired me at that time and really what got me excited was helping people solve a problem and then helping them develop an idea around it. It was like a spark that they could throw gas on and run with. So seeing other people get this idea, catch this, and just run, that's what fired me up. So it wasn't until after I left that opportunity in economic development, when we moved from North Dakota to Wisconsin, that I finally could do something about boutiques and connecting these two pieces. So my father passed away, my husband and I moved to Wisconsin, and that break was enough for me to come back to this original idea of building this online shopping mall of boutiques. When we finally flipped that switch to turn on the very first website, it was kind of magical, because organically, that's when the boutique business side of things started to really build. When the boutique owners that wanted to be featured on the site all of a sudden could be in this Facebook group together and have each other's questions answered. It just kind of took off like wildfire. And at that time, I've got to tell you, I knew nothing about graphic design or about code, but I found someone to just build it. And I knew the rest. I had down the Facebook ads. All of that I'd been studying for many years. Facebook strategy, not Facebook ads for years before all of that started. So creating the hub. For me, creating a boutique would have been great, but creating the hub was so much more important, because, again, it wasn't about starting a business, but it was about starting an opportunity that I knew could change lives. And it certainly has. Oh, and by the way, Kenny and Dolly, that's like my dream picture there. Kenny was my imaginary friend in the first grade. I don't know if that's weird. And I just love Dolly Parton. So why not put that next to a picture of my husband and I, right? Question two is, there's bumps and crazies along the way. How do you keep the vision so clearly? And how do you keep smiling? It's a great question, especially recently, because in this business, in the hub, as in all of your businesses, nothing is ever perfect. You can't make everyone happy, as we all know. And being politically correct is a really difficult thing to do with so many different opinions out there today. So what I've learned is you'll make mistakes in business. I know. I'VE certainly made plenty of mistakes you'll get involved with. You may partner and potentially lose tons of money working with the wrong people. You may lose lots, you may make lots. But what's important is that you learn lots along the way. And I feel like that's our strategy every day at the Hub, is to learn something new, to listen as much as we can to the community and then try to do something better the next day. So whatever it is we do at the Hub, because our core is impacting lives and helping people, we know that we're going to have conflicts from time to time. We know there's going to be fires among 3,000 women from time to time. Amen. But when those happen, honestly, we just try to look for a win win situation in it all. We hope that we all can be adults, agree to disagree, and then move on and have each other's best interests at heart. And then on the really crazy days at the boutique hub, there's wine, right? As in your business, too. So the one thing that I know for certain that I just want to leave you with is that whether it's you or it's me, I know that success is 99.9% mindset. It's not just the social media strategy that you hear and all these other tips and tricks. It's truly your mindset. And I know that we choose our own outcomes every single day based on what we feed. Whether it's the fear that we're going to feed or whether it's the gratitude and the vision that we're going to feed. Remember the list of the five things I wanted you to be grateful for every single day? That's what we should be focusing on. And if there's one thing that I have definitely learned this week, it's that no matter where you are in this room, no matter where you are in your business, someone else here is at the exact same spot as you. You guys are not alone. You are not alone. What you've built at the Hub is pretty cool because you have someone else that is just right there with you that you can call on anytime to help you through whatever it is you're facing. So I know in the end, right, like our parents told us, it's not what we know, but it's who we know. And I know that because of that, you guys have the power to change everything, whether it's in your business or if it's in the future of retail. So with that, you guys, I just want to say thank you. I want to personally thank you for coming to the Boutique Summit. I want to thank you for sharing your time and your travel with us. And I can't wait to share with you what else is to come this evening. Thank you guys for coming.