When I see a new business or an emerging individual with any amount of significant success, I always research their history. Most of the time, I always find a big body of consistent work that they were generating without getting much attention for it. Usually, they’ve been creating a lot of content and working consistently to put themselves out there over the course of many years.
As I built the Urban Southern brand with my cousin, Regina, I experienced this first hand.
Regina initially started Urban Southern with her husband and a passion for design. She grew her ideas as many other small business begin — getting someone to build a website, selling her bags on Etsy, and setting up a booth at local events.
After the first year and a half, Urban Southern had a total of 45 sales online. It was a great hobby with potential at this point, and Regina knew it could become so much more. One morning, we both got excited over the idea to use our story and a vision to create a brand by women, for women. So I left my position as the Creative Director of an agency to jump into self employment and rebrand Urban Southern.
We had a lot of ideas and a lot of passion, but it took time to create sustainable sales for Urban Southern. It slowly grew from those first 45 online sales to a million in sales in just under three years. Focusing on building deeper rather than wider, Urban Southern's email lists grew from less than 500 subscribers to 10,000. What we were doing together was certainly working well.
It took consistency and seizing unique opportunities to create not only traction for the business, but to also make a difference for women.
It Takes Patience to Catch a Big Fish
When I was growing up, my grandpa taught my brothers and I that a whole lot of patience was necessary to catch a fish. Keeping this in my mind, I was patient with each marketing strategy that I implemented. If I didn’t see satisfactory results, I would either refine my methods and try again or cast my line in new waters.
I was willing to learn anything that I needed to learn. I already had years of experience under my belt with blogging, social media marketing, and graphic design, but I quickly realized that I was now playing games in a whole new ball field with building a new brand. Being responsible for our sales, I needed to learn new skills to get Urban Southern in front of audiences that would be interested in what we were doing.
I signed up for new webinars every week and read multiple books on marketing. I immediately started practicing what I was learning. Besides coming up with new ad strategies, creating new ad campaigns, growing our email lists, writing regular blog posts, and managing social media, I started writing pitches. I paid for a crash course to learn PR marketing. By using data bases with journalists and networking, I watched for any opportunity I could find to submit pitches. Quietly and patiently, I wrote and submitted pitch after pitch.
After three months of consistently submitting hundreds of pitches, I got an email from a producer at Fox News on October 6th, 2017. He was interested in hearing more about Urban Southern’s story after getting a heads up from one of my pitches.
“Hi Meg,
I’m with Fox News/Business and writing you to learn more about your company, Urban Southern…”
The following Monday morning, I got a phone call from a film producer and an executive producer from Fox News.
Exactly one week later, Regina Bauman (founder of Urban Southern) and I were sitting across from cameras and lights.
Yeah. It happened THAT FAST.
I was shy and nervous in front of the cameras, not fully realizing that I had just caught a big fish for Urban Southern. My patience paid off. I had always believed that the sacrifices of entrepreneurship were going to pay off, and I was right. In the next season, we had some fish on the table to go with our bread.
Tell a Story that Empowers Others
In order to build Urban Southern into a sustainable brand, we crafted a relatable, empowering story for our brand. Then we told that story over and over and over and over again. We got creative and found different ways to tell the same story. We weaved our story into everything that we did. We told our story even after we got tired of telling it.
And it worked.
FROM AMISH TO FASHION: A BRAND BY WOMEN FOR WOMEN
On the morning when our feature went live on Fox Business, we watched as our website traffic blew up! It was an incredible feeling. Fox News did a beautiful job of telling Urban Southern’s story.
“The focus was on simplicity, on not having a lot of things, only having the things that were necessary, that were quality,” Bauman tells Fox News. “When I am designing a bag I am thinking about ‘her,’ the everyday woman who is going to use the bag.”
Despite her work ethic and a clear vision for the company, starting a business was all new to Bauman. “The first year I really thought it might fail, because I kind of had this idea that I would put up this website and put it out there and people would just find it and buy things. And that didn’t happen,” she says.
It wasn’t until Bauman’s cousin, Meg Delagrange, called her up one day with an idea to work together, that the business really began to make strides. To help tell Urban Southern’s story, Delagrange suggested embracing their Amish upbringing.
“We could tell this story of how we were born Amish, and we can have a brand for women who have overcome some interesting things in life,” says Delagrange. (Source)
We told our story so often that others started repeating the story and sharing it with their friends. Ladies loved telling others about the leather bag they were carrying and why it was so special to them. They loved how our story intertwined with their story. They loved being part of something that was making a difference.
Set Both Big and Small Goals to Get Enough Traction to Keep Going
When you’re in the middle of growing a new brand, you are full of so many hopes and dreams and even strong gut feelings about what will make it successful. But what’s actually going to work? And how do you know when something is working well?
We could define Urban Southern’s success in many ways, but the most important success in the beginning was to get enough traction each month to keep doing what we set out to do.
We really had no idea whether the exposure on Fox Business would blow up our brand or not. We often looked at each other after the initial interview and wondered, have we finally made it? It was hard to know. We had already experienced some less than desirable results with another big opportunity, but we were cautiously optimistic.
Urban Southern had several “big moments” in 2017. We accessorized shows at New York Fashion Week, had a fun collaboration with Vintage Vogue in Paris, got published as the spotlight feature of Southern Lady magazine, and launched TWO new collections. We all worked so hard that we barely stopped to think about each opportunity as it was happening — we had our noses to the grind!
In the following year, we kept growing. Urban Southern appeared in several more magazines, including a local favorite, Nashville Interiors, and USA Today Women. In the fall of 2018, we ran a full page ad in the Magnolia Journal.
Nothing was an overnight success for Urban Southern. Regina and I had quite a few moments of wondering if we could actually make a go of this thing, but we didn’t spend too much time wallowing in those doubts. We just kept working. And that was a crucial key to gaining enough traction to keep moving forward.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
After our day of filming with Fox News/Business, we waited for our feature to be online. We often woke up and fell asleep checking FoxBusiness.com with anticipation. We felt like we were waiting on pins and needles!
What would this feature do for our brand? How would they tell our story?
We simply couldn’t know the answers to our hopes, so we just kept working in the meantime. I kept creating as many ad campaigns as I could for the holidays, using self-edited videos that I shot in the leather shop. Regina’s sister and product manager, Ruby Schwartz, and our other leather seamstress, Brittany Hershberger, sewed as many leather bags as they could make to fill out Urban Southern’s inventory.
Not only did we have this online feature to prepare for, but we were also preparing for an upcoming Holiday Market with Made South and our holiday sales. We weren’t going to wait to see if this feature alone would be the answer to the momentum that we have been working so hard to gain all year. We were working every angle and every opportunity that we had.
We didn’t put all of our eggs in one basket!
As a small business, you can’t afford to put all of your eggs in one basket. Sometimes a specific opportunity amounts to more than you imagined it could be, but it always takes many small wins to create significant momentum.
As a result of relentlessly creating brand exposure, sales blew up for Urban Southern. The Fox Business interview, coupled with the ad campaigns and the holiday markets, pushed the brand to not only national but international audiences.
Build a Brand with a Greater Purpose — Make a Difference
The first time I called Regina with the idea to build a brand together, the idea centered around making a difference for other women. That was our “why”.
This "why" was the core belief that kept me going when the months felt achingly lonely (I worked remotely) and the task of getting enough sales to keep going looked too overwhelming. This “why” motivated all of us in some way or another. This “why” was always stronger than any compelling reason to quit and throw in the towel prematurely.
We had multiple opportunities to give back to local communities and broader communities with Urban Southern. And we kept showing up to become the best that we could be, allowing others to look in and watch that process through our Facebook Live videos.
One of the most exciting projects that we took on was something that we called “Equip Her”. Our audience got involved and shared it with their friends. Together, we raised enough money to buy all of the kitchen supplies for a safe house in Greece, for women who had been rescued from human trafficking. Now these women would not only heal though making meals together, but they would also hone a skill that could help them find employment after their period of rehabilitation.
Have a Team Mentality = We, not Me
Urban Southern was not about what one woman could do by herself, but about what all of US could accomplish together. It was about creating space for each every woman’s talent and voice to shine. Together, we could become unstoppable.
Building the Urban Southern brand was a journey of building relationships and a way to help other women find themselves. From each #WinWednesday email to writing for the blog to showing up on weekly Facebook live videos, we shared honestly with our own stories and struggles. Woven into the brand were elements of thoughtful storytelling and intentional transparency.
This established an incredible amount of trust within our brand, but it also did so much more than that. By reading our stories and watching us grow, many times awkwardly, women found identity and clarity for their own journeys. Through identifying with us, women felt more inspired to use their own voices.
No one has ever built a successful brand without a supportive community. Urban Southern could not have the success that it continues to have without the incredible community that surrounds and supports it.
Urban Southern was about US, all of us.
Building Urban Southern as a brand became so much bigger than two little Amish girls, and that is something I will always be humbled by and so incredibly grateful for. Thank you for being part of that journey.
Now, how will you help to build something that’s bigger than you?
How will you make a difference?
