306 | Always learning, improving & evolving business with Jill Shephard, Ruff House Print Shop

You have heard me say it before, and I'm gonna remind you again, strong businesses are built through slow, steady, intentional growth. Today's guest is proof that slow, steady growth is necessary to scale a creative business.

Jill Shephard is the owner of Ruff House Print Shop. She started her business in 2009, initially specializing in custom wedding invitations. She then spent 14 years prioritizing professional development, refining her business model, expanding her team, and strengthening her customer experience. In the process, she built a profitable and sustainable company that she is proud of.

Today, Jill and I are talking about her entrepreneurial journey from custom wedding invitations to a brick and mortar retail shop to selling wholesale to over 3,000 shops around the world. Jill also reveals her strategies for maintaining a thriving business, the importance of continuous learning, and the impact of participating in programs like Paper Camp, even as a seasoned entrepreneur.

Today’s episode is brought to you by our free, on-demand wholesale audio series. In this audio series, I’ll walk you through the biggest mistakes and most common questions folks have when they are starting and scaling wholesale—so you don’t make the same mistakes myself and others did. You can binge this audio series in less than an hour and you can listen on the go in your favorite podcast player. No fluff here, just concrete action steps and answers to help you simplify and strengthen your wholesale sales.

A Timeline of Business Pivots

After launching her custom wedding stationery brand in 2009, Jill scaled her creative business by expanding into wholesale and launching her wholesale line at the National Stationery Show in 2012. As she learned more and more about wholesale, Jill found success with her brand Ruff House Print Shop.

In 2014, she opened her first brick-and-mortar, Ruff House Paperie. Seeing the retail side of buying wholesale, her eyes were opened to the potential, which prompted a revamp of her entire wholesale line in 2015. By 2019, she discontinued her wedding stationery products to focus on wholesale.

As you know, 2020 brought its own struggles. She was forced to temporarily close down her brick-and-mortar storefront, which left her with many decisions to make. This gave her time to finetune how the business would run, ultimately resulting in rebranding and splitting her brand into two: Ruff House Paperie (her brick-and-mortar) and Ruff House Print Shop (which is her line of wholesale products). Once they opened back up, she hit the ground running.

text overlay: "I just want to make pretty paper things and sell them, so having to juggle all of the business things has definitely been the hardest for me. -Jill Shephard"

These business pivots are a great reminder that this is your business and you can build whatever you want, whenever you want, and however you want. Your business can be flexible with your vision.

Scaling a Creative Business

During the pandemic, Jill and her team decided to be very proactive. They made a lot of strategic and intentional moves for Ruff House that would guide its success in the years to follow. Those proactive changes included:

Splitting the brands
Building two new websites for those newly aligned brands
Designing new products for the wholesale brand
Building resources

These shifts and pivots ultimately led to their gross sales tripling between 2020 and 2021. Growth isn’t always easy though. During this time, Jill and her team faced some hurdles.

Prior to the shutdown with COVID, she had four employees (two full-time and two part-time). By the end of 2020, she had doubled her employees. This meant she needed to learn how to juggle employees.

As her sales increased, she ran into supply chain issues with shortages and also learned how to source supplies that supported four times the amount that she was used to sourcing.

By 2022, they outgrew their production space and had to move to a warehouse. While they’ve continued to grow, they’ve outsourced some of their manufacturing to other local businesses, yet Jill’s team still manufactures their greeting cards and journals on their own. She had to explore new equipment and manufacturing to maintain the amount of product they were creating.

Overall, the hardest part of all of this was that Jill simply wanted to create. As a creative business owner, she is constantly learning how to be business-minded, yet still prioritize the art she creates and the people she wants to serve.

Learning and Improving in Your Business

As business scales over time, it can feel like you’ve got it all figured out. Strong businesses are built through slow, steady, intentional growth, which sometimes means investing back into your education to learn. Despite the fact that Jill had been in business for over a decade, she decided to take on the role of student and enroll in Paper Camp.

text overlay: "It's always good to be flexible in your vision of what you want for business, because if you allow it to turn into what it will, then it can be great. -Jill Shephard"

Sometimes as a business owner, it is easy to always be head down in your business, forgetting to look up, appreciate what you’ve accomplished, but also explore bigger ideas. Jill found herself looking for a like-minded peer community that could support her and her team.

Going through Paper Camp helped her support her team with:

Understanding every step of the wholesale process
Organization within the brand
Building out schedules for product releases
Tips and tricks for marketing wholesale
Preparing for trade shows

Paper Camp is an intensive program to help you not only understand the steps and processes within wholesale but also why we do things a certain way and how it impacts your business. The alumni community also allows for even more collaboration to take your business to the next level by working with your peers.

If you’re ready to continue to learn, improve, and evolve your business, make sure you’re on the waitlist for Paper Camp!

quick links:

Here is a quick recap of links to other helpful blogs and podcasts shared in this post.

Download These Quotables to Save and Share

MEET JILL

Ruff House Print Shop is a women-owned & run stationery lifestyle brand located in Lawrence, Kansas. We specialize in journals, letterpress cards, pens, planners & more. We are proud to make stationery products the old-fashioned way with hand-printed covers and small batch assembly since 2009.

We value quality, great customer service and positivity in all aspects of life. Our team works each day with these core values in mind so we can inspire your positive, adventurous life.

CONNECT WITH JILL

WEBSITE: ruffhouseprintshop.com | INSTAGRAM: @ruffhouseprintshop | FACEBOOK: @ruffhouseprintshop

WEBSITE: ruffhousepaperie.com| INSTAGRAM: @ruffhousepaperie | FACEBOOK: @ruffhousepaperie

Connect with Katie Hunt

Katie Hunt is a business strategist, podcaster, mentor and mama to four. She helps product based businesses build profitable, sustainable companies through her conferences, courses and coaching programs.

Website: prooftoproduct.com | Instagram: @prooftoproduct