Sew Successful: Rogers Designer Sees Big Growth

Since opening her retail space in downtown Rogers in July of 2014, Valere Gregory, owner of Valere Rene Handbags & Totes, has worked to design her fun, flirty bags in the shop’s workroom behind a nifty pair of robin’s egg blue barn doors.

But when, in January of this year, it came time to bring on another seamstress to help crank out the more than 650 bags a month the business produces, she and her design table got evicted from the workspace and were forced to relocate up front where on any given day customers can see Gregory bent over the table sketching, editing, creating.

“It just started getting cramped back there,” she says on a bright Thursday morning in early March. “But the upside is it got my creative juices flowing and, since moving up front, I’ve had like four or five new ideas.”

That seems to be Gregory’s M.O.: turning a challenge into an opportunity.

After all, her business was conceived during one of the biggest challenges life can throw out, and just two years in, it’s a business in the midst of the kind of growth spurt that many an entrepreneur/maker could only dream of. 

Rekindling a Lifelong Dream

In 2012, Gregory, a wife and mother of two teenage daughters with a busy career in dentistry, was faced with a devastating health issue that forced her to leave the job she’d held for 14 years.

To fill her time and earn some extra money for the family, she turned to her old sewing machine. “I’m not one to feel sorry for myself,” Gregory says when recalling that time. “I was a self-taught sewer, so I just started piddling, making baby gifts for friends, just odds and ends.”

In the process, she managed to rekindle a lifelong dream. Indeed, growing up, the Texas native who moved to Northwest Arkansas at the age of 4, had always fanaticized about a career in fashion design.

One day, a friend asked her to design and sew her a makeup bag, something Gregory had never attempted before. Not only did she take up the challenge, she decided to use it as an opportunity to solve one of her own day-to-day dilemmas. “Being sick and having to pack bags for the hospital, I never could find the right bag,” she says. “I always ended up with my stuff in a Ziploc bag.”

“In designing that first makeup bag,” she adds, “what I was going for was a bag big enough to put your necessities in, but not too big that it wouldn’t fit in a standard-sized purse.”

Her friend’s delight at the finished product compelled Gregory to begin making the bags in small batches to sell on social media. Soon, she was holding regular Instagram sales — a.k.a. Instasales — at the end of each week, where she’d sell whatever bags she’d made during the week. The bags consistently sold out, and fast.

 “Valere’s decision to sell her bags on social media was a good one,” points out Jayshica Lopez-Amargós, executive consultant and head of minority small business inclusion at Startup Junkie Consulting LLC. “Social media is a great way to validate the market, to see if people are willing to pay for what you’re offering.” 

After hosting an at-home shopping event during Christmastime, which resulted in a rush on her bags, Gregory realized it was time to assess whether she had a bona fide business on her hands.

It was about that time that she met with a local venture capital fund run by The Moxie Group LLC, a Fayetteville-based firm that was interested in taking a chance on her.

“When we think about investing in a company, it comes down to people,” explains Burt Box, president of The Moxie Group. “Valere’s determination is just ridiculous. She doesn’t have a stop button and that’s something we picked up on pretty early.”

In securing that startup VC funding, Gregory was already well ahead of the game. To be sure, while women entrepreneurs are majority owners of an estimated 10 million businesses, (or, as reported by the U.S. Small Business Administration in 2014, 36 percent of all businesses in the United States), companies with a woman CEO at the helm only received 3 percent of the total VC dollars, or $1.5 billion out of the total of $50.8 billion invested during 2011-2013, according to Babson College’s “Diana Report”.

A Thriving Operation

Just two years after officially launching, Valere Rene Handbags & Totes is a thriving operation. The business is run from that aforementioned 1,200-SF, brick-and-mortar, boutique and production space at 210 S. First St. in Rogers.

The bright and cheerful retail space with its exposed brick, towering ceilings and colorful displays of makeup bags, totes and beach bags (think sloths, pink flamingos, seer sucker and rose garden prints) and Valere Rene-designed jewelry has become a favorite with both local and visiting fashionistas.

In fact, last year, one of the latter, who happened to work for Martha Stewart, dipped in and was so impressed with what she saw, that she convinced Gregory to enter Martha Stewart Living’s “American Made” competition. (The awards honor makers, small-business owners and creative entrepreneurs in the fields of crafts, design, food and style.) As a result, the Rogers-based company was named a 2015 Martha Stewart “American Made” finalist.

The national recognition coincided with a shift in sales. In the beginning, it was foot traffic into the store that drove business, with upward of 90 percent of sales coming from that customer base.

But now, the vast majority of sales is driven by both wholesale relationships and e-commerce. To be sure, as of today, Gregory has 60 wholesale relationships with other small businesses — both boutiques and gift shops — in states all across the country. Wholesale retailers typically find Gregory’s line of bags and jewelry thanks to Instagram. But recently New York-based Road Runners LLC, a firm that represents small-batch manufacturers in different regions of the country, asked to represent the Valere Rene line in the Southwest region.

“This gives us another avenue of visibility for the buyers of local businesses in that region,” Gregory says. “Being in a big-box store has never been my business plan; it’s locally owned businesses that I aspire to partner with.”

And while Gregory says e-commerce and wholesale will likely continue to drive business in the future, in addition to adding on a new production space sometime in the next year, her five-year plan includes the possibility of two or three additional brick-and-mortar stores, likely out of state. 

And despite the obvious spurt the business is experiencing, Gregory sees even more expansion ahead.

“I don’t think we’ve reached the peak of our growth yet,” she says.