I met Stacey Montgomery after one of her speaking engagements. She is a woman who believes strongly about empowering kids. She moved to the Chicago area from the east coast for school and stuck around after graduation due to her landing a great job. Since then she’s become an entrepreneur. I asked her how she transitioned to being an owner of a growing company known for empowerment.
“I was looking forward to buying a Christmas card to send out because it was the first time that I sent out my own Christmas cards,” says Stacey. “To me, that’s what adulting is all about, sending out Christmas cards… I wanted a card that represented me, a card that had a relatable character, my skin tone, but also represented my personality.”
Our new inclusive culture hadn’t caught up to the needs Stacey faced in purchasing cards, so she went home and drew her own card.
“I sent it to family and friends, got great feedback, and some of them suggested, ‘You know, you should sell this.’”
Stacey acted on those suggestions and soon had orders from Marshall Field’s, Nordstrom, Carson, and numerous independent stores. She then shifted over to developing licensing deals with companies like Target. The positive cashflow allowed her to expand her offerings beyond Christmas cards. She soon developed invitations, note cards, stationery, and the like.
“I realized that my quest, my obsession with finding a good card, the perfect card, was all about confidence. It was all about me wanting to see something, or wanting to give something that really represented me, my personality, what I look like, all of that combined. I realized that that wasn’t just something that I want. It’s what people want. It’s what kids want. It’s what adults want. We like to see positive images of ourselves and what we like out in the world.”
Her revelation focused her business pursuits on building the self-esteem of kids with diverse skin colors. She wanted her product line to encourage kids and build their confidence.
“I started making illustrations of kids with different skin tones, different skin colors, different ethnicities… I wanted people to see the diversity in the world, and I wanted people to see, kids to see, themselves… Kids would come up and look at it, and they would see something, and they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s me! That’s me!’ That was what it was all about.”
With thousands of kids trying to build confidence based on who they are, Stacey started crafting special guided journals to help them work through and find their intrinsic value.
“What I wanted to do was to… encourage kids to, again, think about themselves, about their gifts, to have a place where they can… navigate some of the challenging situations and the negativity. In school, there’s bullying, there’s name-calling… There are difficult situations academically, socially… A lot of situations are challenging. So I really wanted the kids to have a foundation that was all about self-love, belief in themselves, (and) self-worth.”
To continue driving success, Stacey sought help from a marketing strategist who had her focus on developing a mission statement, an ideal customer, and a family of related products. She was coached to use the mission statement and her ideal customer as a filter to determine what great products to produce and which ones to drop.
While the process was daunting, she stuck with it to help more kids.
“I’m not trying to reach just one kid, I’m trying to reach thousands of kids,” she says. “I now conduct workshops in schools, I have subscriptions to my journals, I work with somebody to develop a curriculum, and it’s all because I really honed in on my mission and my ideal customer.”
Stacey’s materials are aimed at kids 8-12 years of age. Her website is located at staceymdesign.com and offers an array of items that help build the self-esteem of kids who are of varying ethnicities.