Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Walker and Anna Didwa.
Hi Emily and Anna, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
We started HWY109 on a couple hundred dollars and a dream of retiring in our early 40s. No, really… we were both planning covid weddings and could not find any kind of rental company that A. had what both of us wanted, and B. gave us guidance with design. We decided, “Hey, this will be a fun little side gig for us.” I (Emily) offered up my family game room for storage and my backyard for all of our builds and projects. We spent a solid 4 months collecting inventory and literally working every extra minute between our full-time jobs and kids’ taekwondo in our “creation station” or driving all over Texas to pick up items we felt would be exclusive to our inventory. Finally, our launch day came. We stayed up until 4 in the morning, making sure the website was ready to go live. Anna was sleeping at the foot of my desk while I tried to wrap everything up. We used our first order money to get a storage unit to hold some of our inventory and host brides there to help with design set up and we thought we had made it! A space of our own! And we did OWN that place. No shame. Met all of brides there; no bathroom, no heat in the cold, no air in the summer, but we had our own space. Our goal our first year was to average two weddings a month. Within a month of being open, we had bookings for two weddings per weekend. Our fun little side gig for us turned into a second full-time job for the both of us. We were lucky enough to have found our storefront in Handley Wedding District, and HWY109 finally had air conditioning and a restroom! Where we are now definitely was not easy, but it has been fun. We don’t get every weekend with our families anymore, but we have traveled EVERYWHERE in Texas and met the most amazing vendors in the industry.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
HWY109 definitely has been bumpy ride. We were not prepared for how much business we had right off the bat. Goals that we had set for ourselves in our 5-year plan were happening our first year. And yes, that was a blessing, but we were/ are currently still learning how to balance and juggle everything. I am sure that most female small business owners feel the same way. We started this business to have more time with our families and kids and kind of be able to make our own schedule. Joke is on us! We are still trying to navigate how to make it to all the baseball games, not miss the choir concerts, and just in general how to stay present with our families while some weekends, decorating a dozen weddings! Luckily for us, we always try to fill in when the other one can’t, and we have an amazing group of people that help us out whenever we send out the bat signal.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about what you do?
HWY109 Couture is an exclusive event design and rental company. What works best for us and usually our clients is inviting them into our space and just spending some time brainstorming together. We walk you through every detail of your big event and how your Pinterest board envisions it. Our job is literally to relieve them of some of the stress. I can’t tell you how many of our brides just reach out saying they are lost and need help and that is what we do. We help our clients bring twenty different visions and vibes into a cohesive theme. We can both agree that as a business, we are most impressed with how authentic our clientele finds us. We genuinely put our all into all of our events, and they can see this. Always, always, always we refer potential clients to our reviews that kind of speak for themselves. We are girls’ girls and love to make our brides feel like they are part of our squad. Our brides are trusting us with one of the biggest days of their lives, and who else would you trust more than someone in your girl gang?
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Heyyyy! We always say we are the luckiest… sometimes. If you do know us or have been to HWY109, you know that we are sometimes a bit chaotic and can bring a series of unfortunate events on ourselves, but for the most part, we have been beyond blessed. As we said before, we achieved goals our first year of business that we did not even think about until we were at least five years in. We have been so fortunate to have some of the best brides any business can ask for. Opportunities have and continue to come our way that Anna would say is due to hard work and dedication and myself (Emily) would say is probably because of our charming sense of humor and witty personalities. Overall, though, Hwy109 Couture has been lucky. We made a successful business from literally nothing in the middle of worldwide pandemic.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.hwy109couture.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hwy109couture/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hwy109couture
