Listen to our first episode!

Transcript

Hey, guys. I'm so excited to be here. If you've been following me for a while on all my socials, you will know that I've been playing with making a podcast for the longest time. 

And now that I am full time in the business, I've just gone ahead and just done it. So, a little bit about me is I'm a business owner, I'm a mum, I've been a marketer working in the corporate world for 20 odd years. I've now left that game and I'm now full time in my business. 

So, Only the Sweet Stuff grew from this very room. Actually, the study that I'm working in now, I started by making personalised gifts, one off gift just for myself, because I was pregnant at the time and pregnant with Chris, my second. 

And my pregnancy, first time around with Jaden was so bad in terms of morning sickness that I lost six kilos or something crazy like that in my first trimester. So, hyperemesis, however you say it, Gravidarum or whatever, that was real for me and it was really bad. So, second time around husband basically said, you need something to keep your mind off the nausea. And because I had been looking at this fan dangle cricut machine, I had been toying with this idea of getting one. But $700 is not easy to drop on this machine that you don't really know nothing about. But my husband, in all his wisdom, knew better. 

So, he went and got me the machine and I just started making stuff. I was really overwhelmed in this machine and making this, but all I was doing was just trying to create and try to keep my mind off this nausea. So, I think I made one bottle, and I did a decal for a candle that I got from Kmart for my sister. 

I didn't know it at the time, but I was marketing myself. So, for me, all I was doing was sharing my journey, as in all I did was take photo and post it on my personal socials. And then it turned into a video showing people what I was making. And then I think I did one-time lapse video showing a weeding process. Then people started seeing what I was doing and messages.

I remember my good friend Alexis, who's a family friend of mine, she messaged to me and she said, “Hey, Debbie, can you make gifts like this?” I think she sent a picture of a bottle or a candle, can't remember. And I was like, “Actually, yes, I can because I just made this candle for my sister.” And I sent her the picture and she was like, “Okay, I need 20.” I think it was 20 or 30, I can't remember. And next day she sent me a list and she was like, “How much?” And I'm like, I don't know. 

So, I ended up just charging her cost because I was like, I really don't know what I'm doing and It's going to take me a while. Yeah, so I just started making stuff, Merv took Jaden out that weekend, and I think it took me the whole weekend, literally 8 hours of me sitting there crushing like this trying to figure out how to weed all these names. 

It took me that whole weekend to get her order out. I didn't even know it at the time it was an order, but it was and I still have that picture of the candles that she asked. And then after that, she said she wanted keychains, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I know how to make them too.” And then she added on a bottle decal and it ended up being like 35 pieces or 40 pieces. 

So yes, that's how it all started and from there it grew into and because I had just given birth to Chris at the time and it was really hard to manage this tiny baby and still have two hands to make something. So, I realized that my forte is not so much in the making, but in the retailing. 

Having a look at what's trending working with suppliers overseas to get them in, fast moving goods that I can then pair with my marketing experience to help people like you—grow their businesses. So that's why I'm here. It's a long-winded story, but I thought it was important to talk you through my background. 

I really hope this podcast is a hub of knowledge for you guys. And I'm going to be learning and sharing everything that I learned, but also interviewing other experts in this space because we don't know what we don't know, right? 

So, I would love for you to come along on the ride and let me know if I'm on the right track, if you learned something, if you didn’t, and if it's fluff, let me know because I'm learning as we go, too. Thanks so much for spending your time with me. I really appreciate it. And here we go!