Vicki Ravenel and Jodi Henson, longtime friends, came up with this amazing business idea while in the midst of a natural disaster and have never looked back. You can feel their passion and dedication to their customers as they work tirelessly to create a personal touch and lasting impression to the people who receive these special gifts.
Their company, A Wish For You, offers the delivery of a keepsake card expressing your personal and thoughtful sentiment accompanied by a small memento to share with the special people in your life. You can check out their website, connect with them through Facebook or follow their pins on Pinterest. They are passionate about social media as you can see through their Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Read on to be encouraged by their story and gain insights on how they plan to become globally recognized as the amazing female entrepreneurs they are.
Tell Us About Yourselves:
We {Vicki and Jodi} are longtime friends, former co-workers, and strong believers in the power of female friendships. We share the firm belief that when we support each other amazing things happen!
In addition to that core philosophy, we share many other similarities: we are both wives, mothers, dog lovers, and the beach is our “happy place!” We are fortunate in our lives to have amazing family and friends who inspire us, support us, and teach us every day.
Our business partnership is a wonderful reflection of our friendship and the mutual respect and admiration we hold for one another. It is our greatest delight to continue to grow this business and watch what evolves when hearts are shared!
We launched A Wish For You on March 24, 2017 and it has been an exciting and challenging adventure from the start. Nothing is more rewarding or energizing as when we see the amazing and uplifting sentiments our customers send out to others. Honestly, we just can’t get enough of it!
How did you get into your business?
Having worked together in the corporate world a few years ago, we knew we wanted to work together again and start our own business. It took about 2 years for the actual business concept to come together. Interestingly enough, the business idea was born as a result of and during Hurricane Matthew in 2016. We had a girls weekend with 5 other girlfriends scheduled in Asheville, NC. Vicki lives in Charleston, SC and Jodi lives on Amelia Island in Florida. Due to the hurricane, we both were required to evacuate our homes, so we met in Columbia, SC before the start of our girls weekend and got to work on the business idea while driving to Asheville together. The concept met all of our requirements for the business we wanted to have: helping others, heartfelt-driven, online and flexible in location; we mapped out our action plans and off we went!
What has been your biggest challenge?
Our biggest challenge was getting the right, qualified person(s) to create the website the way we wanted. We had really bad experiences of promises and commitments from website developers that were hollow. Since web design is not our area of expertise, it was like navigating in a foreign county and not understanding the language. We had to rely on others who proveded to be unreliable. We have slowly improved the website to make ordering a Wish Package easy and fast. The site has more improvements coming down the road, but right now a customer can order a Wish Package in a mere few clicks.
What do you wish you’d known when you started?
We built our initial memento offerings with what we hoped would be diverse options for our customers for whatever occasion they are sending Wish Packages. We have learned over time what types of Wish Packages and mementos our customers like. We knew it would take time, but it would have been soooo nice to know from Day 1.
If you could narrow your success down to one thing, what would it be?
A Wish For You enables our customers to “Be That Friend” in a beautiful yet fast and easy way. We’re all busy and have a million things on our plates. But we want to keep our relationships as a priority in our lives. It’s hard to make a personal gesture that shows genuine effort without spending a fortune or taking hours through multiple trips to the stores and post office. Being able to personalize a gift (and not a computer-generated message at the bottom of an invoice) through writing a personalized message, having it inserted into a very expensive and gorgeous
card, and putting it with the right memento, and finally having it beautifully wrapped shows how thoughtful our customers really are. And we make it very quick and easy. Our customers love that wrapping and shipping are complimentary too. So, enabling our customers to show how thoughtful they are truly being is what makes us successful.
Where do you see yourselves in a year?
On the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine.
What are your top three tips for women starting a business?
1) Be utterly and unequivocally passionate about your product and service. You must love, love, love it and be that committed to it.
2) Research your product concept – do surveys, create prototypes and get feedback (the best gift you’ll ever receive). Engage anyone that you know who will be honest with you. Listen carefully.
3) Ask for help – don’t be afraid to let others know what you’re doing and ask them to help you!!
What Is A Typical Day For You Like?
Because we both have other jobs, we basically work at a 90-mph pace. We are both early risers so we start working on A Wish For You before the rooster crows! First thing in the morning we are checking the store platform and fulfilling orders. We are reviewing scheduled posts and checking on social media platforms for any posts or promotions that need our attention.
Throughout the day we are texting or jumping on a phone call to one another to work on operational issues such as inventory re-orders and working on content for our website and our social media channels. We divide and conquer all the work so depending on what needs to be addressed is how the work gets delegated. At the end of the day we are fulfilling more orders and taking care of anything that needs attention. We text every single day. We talk on the phone almost every single day. Sometimes we facetime. And we are sharing information in email all day long, whether it is a new idea, a status update, a customer question, opportunities
with our partners, etc.
What’s your business motto or quote you live by?
Always remember to share your heart.
If you were starting your business over again, what would you do differently?
We would hire a social media marketing firm that can provide hands-on social media analysis.
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