Today we’d like to introduce you to Britany Kutch.
Britany, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
This is us… The very raw story behind MKD. Our story—the Madi Kay Designs story—is about growing, changing and improving! First, we had… each other.
Trent and Britany 11.19.05. #FAMILYOFTWO. We were both raised by single mothers and agree that the experiences of our childhood are what has made us who we are today: strong-willed, determined, ambitious, stubborn, and very passionate in everything we do. A quote that we live by is “nobody ever made a difference by being like everyone else”. We joke often that you could not pay us all the money in the world to go back through our childhood again, but we wouldn’t trade it for the world either because it’s what made us who we are today!
My childhood involved my parents’ divorce due to physical & mental abuse, alcoholism, adultery and mental illness. I had to grow up way too fast and be a “mother” rather than a sister to my 2 sisters and brother. I graduated at 17 and left home the day I was able. I wanted a college degree to ensure I would never have to rely on a man for my finances or happiness. Little did I know I would marry my high school sweetheart and create a life I had only dreamed of. Things are not always easy, we have had many ups and downs, but Trent and I are definitely “Better Together.”
Then we had…. Mason 08.21.07 and Madi Kay 04.01.10 (April Fools). #FAMILYOFFOUR. But, we wanted something… more. So in 2010 Madi Kay Designs started with 2 broke college graduates who soon became 2 poor teachers and parents of a 3-year-old son and newborn daughter (Madi Kay) that just needed to buy Christmas gifts for their family.
Trent, who dabbled in winemaking, bottled a batch and I designed the Holiday label.
Then of course what do underpaid, overworked teachers (mostly woman) love after a long day… well drinking wine of course! So, I may have bootlegged some wine out of the trunk of my car to pay for our first vinyl plotting machine. What started as just a hobby soon led to an opportunity for me to stop teaching and work the business full time. Now we have… Mom’s Telling Their Story. Our products are Made by The Best Women In TEXAS. Our designs are finely crafted by skilled designers in DFW. When art brings unique ideas and talented people together, it’s a beautiful thing.
As a woman run business #MKDFAMILYOFTEN we not only tell #YOURSTORY, but we get to tell #OURSTORY as working MOM’s. We are a diverse group, but we all share a deep desire to make a difference and uplift others through story gathering and storytelling through special, heartfelt signs. We have always believed and tried to instill the thought to our children that you can do anything you set your mind to and that nothing is impossible. We find success in being honest about who we are and the things we care about. We don’t always agree but respect our differences, and we are inspired to continue owning the #MKDSTORY and telling… #YOURSTORY.
TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE: One tree at a time. As a family-owned company, our Earth’s precious resources, and their sustainability for generations to come are very important to us. That’s why we’re dedicated to environmental responsibility in all we do. We’re proud to partner with American Forest, and we happily plant one tree in honor of each wood print order we receive.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
2011: Just like my husband’s book collection we started our business all over the place with lots of ideas and figured out very quickly that we needed to simplify and narrow it to a specialty which now is signs, picture frames & engraved products. The materials we used for our signs included the following: wood, paint, stain, vinyl letters, old windows, crosses, scrapbook paper, crosses, guitars, iron stars, old barn wood, floor tiles, mirrors etc. We listed many signs on Etsy and honestly sold very little. We almost closed our Etsy shop in the summer of 2011 due to lack of sales.
Then we started selling our simple 8 x 24 last name signs and they just took off! We learned then it was time to fine tune what we sold. At this time it was only Trent and I working after we taught all day and came home to our 2 kids. I personally designed all signs, answered emails, cut the vinyl for the signs, laid the vinyl, painted, weeded, sanded, backed each sign. Trent was in charge of cutting all the wood, base coating each sign and boxing and bookkeeping. We opened a booth in a little antique shop in downtown Waxahachie and sold signs through Etsy and the store. We wrote up all orders on a carbon copy invoice. No employees.
2012: As our company grew we needed more help so we hired a second designer and a part-time employee to come to our home to help with some of the days today. We closed our shop in Waxahachie and moved to another shop, Main Street Station in Grapevine, TX. We added home decor items to our shop purchased wholesale and sold things like ornaments, scarves, clothes, furniture, clocks, vases and of course our beautifully hand painted Madi Kay Designs signs. We then opened a shop up with a teacher of mine in Frisco Mercantile.
We loved hunting for new items to repurpose and sell. We had great success that we ended up opening a second booth in Frisco Mercantile and shutting down the shop in Grapevine. We sold our signs at local craft shows. Now looking back at 2012 I have no idea how I ever slept. Our Etsy shop had tripled in sales from 2011. We still wrote orders on a carbon copy system and we took a picture of every sign and emailed it to the customer before it shipped.
2013: So our signs are doing great and we have really gotten into a rhythm so it makes sense to open up a new business…. Vintage Treasure Rentals. We worked with many photographers that loved using our signs as props at weddings and in photo-shoots and loved our eye for finding cool things. We decided to start a business where we rented out furniture for weddings and photo shoots. See there is that squirrel that my husband sees from time to time. We hunted couches, chairs, old rusty wagons, old doors, trunks, chandeliers etc.
All the while Madi Kay Designs was continuing to outgrow our home. We had 2 part-time employees who came and helped during the day while I continued to teach. We decided it was time for our own shop to work. We now had 2 part-time employees and 2 high school kids that helped box and weed the vinyl for us. I still continued to design most signs and my second designer helped design other signs.
We moved up in technology and started using ship station for our invoices instead of the carbon copy invoices that left lots of room for human error. Our Christmas 2013 was huge and we once again doubled our sales. But realized with the growth of Madi Kay Designs and full time teaching we could not run both Vintage Treasure Rentals and Madi Kay Designs. So we stopped Vintage treasure rentals in 2014.
2014: We buy a new machine that prints the sign directly to vinyl and we lay the vinyl to the wood. This was our new cheaper option as the orders where increasing, but with hand painting signs came much room for human error and waste. Hand-painted signs cost much more because there is so much time involved in the process. Base coat sign with paint or stain, sand sign, create the vinyl stencil, lay the vinyl stencil. Paint each word the different colors without them touching, wait for the sign to dry. Weed the vinyl from the sign in hopes there are no paint runs or blurs due to the natural wood grain.
Once dry we sanded and distressed each sign. The new Roland machine allowed us to do the same thing, but provided a cheaper option for our customers. With the new process there was also room for error. When laying the vinyl to the wood there could be bubbles in between the vinyl and the wood. We also started setting up for a 4 day show once a month in Canton, TX “First Monday Trade Days.” We had to set up the walls and hang all the signs. We did this for the year rain or shine. Holiday weekends. Hot or cold. I did this on my own for the first few months then hired an employee to set up the booth and work it. This was a lot of work for very little profit. We hit record numbers at Christmas both online and in our booths, but we were slowly fading.
2015: Trent got a new job in Frisco, TX so we were making a move an hour from our shop. This seemed like the best time for me to make the transition to work the business full time and not teach the next year. We kept our shop in Red Oak and I commuted once a week. We had a shop manager and 2 other part-time employees that handled the hand painted and printed vinyl signs. We felt very disconnected with the shop so far so we decided to move the business to McKinney, but with that came lots of change. All new employees which was very scary for us. We trained 2 new employees, but with so much change and frustration with new processes those employees did not last very long.
Feeling very defeated and very overwhelmed we trusted things would work out and they did! I met 2 lovely ladies from my neighborhood that soon took on very important roles in the company and most importantly became lifelong friends! They both were hired for part-time roles but learned with this growing company they soon became full-time employees and critical pieces to our successful business. This year we learned of a machine that was able to print directly to wood (similar to an engraving machine), but was able to take our designs and print them directly to wood with NO vinyl. This was a HUGE deal for our company. A game changer if you will. We did not compromise our standards and one could actually argue we improved our techniques since the printer is able to print crisp and clean with little room for error.
With this came added expenses that we had to figure out how to handle. We had a production shop in McKinney that was much more than our Red Oak shop, more employees and machines and sales were still increasing, but not as fast as they had in previous years. We needed to figure out how to diversify. We added picture frames to what we printed this year and started framing some of our signs. Once again we double our sales from the previous year. Employees: design team: Lead Designer + 2 additional designers, Production- Shop Manager + Print Manager + Shipping Manager (part-time employees)
2016: This was the year we decided to pull out of any craft shows, booths and just focus on our online stores. We sold on Etsy, Amazon and our personal site. We were still learning the new machine and how to run it efficiently. We were still having our woodcut in the sizes we offered and stored on our shelves. This meant many hours of inventory and ordering wood each week. We had to put the signs through the machine individually (still faster than hand painting), but if the ink head was not close enough to the wood then the words were not as clean and crisp as we liked. Or if we did not set the wood on the machine just perfect the words would be shifted to one side.
Needless to say, we wasted a lot of wood and money trying to perfect this new process. Our new machine did not print white ink and since we used the real wood we had to figure out a way for colors to print more like the digital proof we sent our customers, so we had to prime each piece of wood with white paint lightly before we printed on it. We didn’t want a thick coat of white, because it would take from the wood grain, but we needed it white enough to show colors brighter. This was a learning process that took a lot of trial and error.
We had 3 different locations and lots of extra travel to make this work. We had a wood guy that cut and primed each piece of wood, then he delivered to the print shop. There we would print and prep the signs. The space was limited to the expensive machines so we then took our signs to our McKinney shop where we sanded and boxed each of the signs. We had a wood framing employee who would take the signs that need frames and frame each of them and return them back to our McKinney shop for shipping. He hunted reclaimed wood and framed each of our signs.
In the summer of 2016, we decided to no longer offer our hand painted signs. This was the year I decided I need to redo our website. We searched many companies and found a company in India that could build exactly what I THOUGHT I wanted. The project was supposed to cost us 6K and after I spent 100’s of hours trying to relay what I wanted to a company with a language barrier and time difference that had me working very early in the morning and very late into the night.
I personally worked around the clock and invested 1,000’s of dollars only to feel like I was chasing my own tail. I needed it ready to be live by October and let’s just say after 6 months of work on it, it was NOWHERE near ready for the big reveal. So I put it on hold for the holidays and once again we double our sales from the previous year, but we had a lot of loss this year due to making mistakes and learning from them…. or so I thought… then there was 2017. Employees: design team: Lead Designer + 2 additional designers, Production- Shop Manager + Print Manager + Shipping Manager (part-time employees)
2017: This is the year of learning who we are, making mistakes and then fine-tuning our business. We learned of a new machine that could do what we have now except it can print the white ink AND cut the wood. So now we were able to run 4’ x 8’ sheets of our wood through the printer instead of cutting the wood first and then printing. This was a HUGE change for our business. Again with this new technology came additional expenses. Since production time was now quicker we were ready to move into the wholesale market. Our framing guys started becoming unpredictable and wood was hard to find.
We went through 3 frame guys in 2 years (the only men working for our company and somehow had the most DRAMA-Ha). We felt like the wood was not as consistent as we hoped for, so we made a decision to mainstream our signs and bring all production under one roof. But that meant we had to change from reclaimed wood to pine wood that we personally stain, paint, sand and distress in 4 colors: walnut, grey, black and white.
Everyone’s opinion of distressed wood was different. Some thought it had too much “character” others thought it was too clean so this was a change we decided to make to uniform our signs so that if a customer ordered one in 2017 and another in 2020 it would be very similar. This also helped with consistency in our wholesale customers.
We started seeing a decrease in sales this year and could not figure out why? We discovered we had not been changing with the trends of technology. We needed to re-brand ourselves and become more active in social media. We hired a company to re-brand us and help “clean up” our website. After much discussion, the new website that I had spent 100’s and 100’s of hours on just was not going to work. We had a great shell in our Shopify site, we just needed a face-lift if you will. We also needed a platform for our wholesale customers to order from. So the work and money started to be spent with this new company.
This was many hours spent on logo design and updates and then the wholesale platform. This company did a great job, but I think they over promised us things they were not able to do with the wholesale part of our website. We had our first BIG show at Dallas Market in Summer 2017 and after many tears and LOTS of frustration, we had a broken website the day we opened for the show. We had printed 100’s of business cards and promotional material and spent 1,000’s of dollars on the set up of this show. This really was a huge deal for our company. We treated these wholesale customers just like we have treated all of our customers from day one…humility and honesty. We feel that goes a long way in today’s world.
Everyone was very understanding and gave us a chance. We gained 24 wholesale customers. Success! So we thought. HA! We offered discounts on shipping and orders at the show as this was our first time to do this. We learned quickly that boxes and shipping cost us more than expected. So there were some orders after all bills paid that we broke even and made no profit and others that we made only a small percentage profit. What doesn’t kill us make us stronger and my muscles are bulging right now. We had to fine-tune our sizes of signs to ensure they fit in the boxes. This meant we had to resize all art files and perfect this new production system. Our re-orders were a success and we actually turned a profit, but we lost a lot for this lesson.
We parted ways with the company that made us promises that were unfilled and we searched for someone else. We knew we were lacking in social media and that needed to be our focus. We also learned that although we own our own business we were working on Etsy. Etsy is able to change the rules and algorithms on searches and we have no control. They started doing “testing” and we had a few months like MANY other successful shops that we did with 50% less sales from the previous year. It was very upsetting. We were told over and over again not keep your eggs in one basket and that we needed to invest in our personal website.
So that is what we started to do. We did some more clean up and started promoting more on social media. This year ended with lots of costly mistakes and behind last years sales. But I feel like all these costly mistakes taught us a great lesson not only in work but our personal journey as well. These mistakes are what has made our business. We may not want to go through them again, but we would not take them away as they are what made the company what it is today. There will always be mistakes to be made and lessons to be learned, but we feel like 2018 is the year for change.
We are setting very clear, defined goals and when the squirrel tries to distract us, we will pull out our goals for the year and if it is not on the list then we will not let us get off target. Employees: design team: Lead Designer + 2 additional designers, Production- Shop Manager + Print Manager + Shipping Manager (part-time employees), Wholesale Rep for MK. And now we have decided the trend for MKD 2018 business will be engraving. We feel very excited about this next chapter of Madi Kay Designs. Stay tuned…
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We create custom gifts for weddings, anniversaries or simply something nice for that hard-to-shop-for friend. We use only quality products and pride ourselves on customer service. We are able to print directly to wood, tin and canvas and engrave wood, glass and metal products. We are a woman run business who is partnered with American Forest and plants one tree for every wood sign sold.
The thing that most sets us apart from others is we do not compromise on quality. We use high-quality wood, tin and canvas instead of cheap foam board, vinyl and other material that competitor companies use. Our products are made to last a lifetime. So if you are looking for cheap products MKD is not your shop!
What were you like growing up?
I was a tomboy that loved to play outside. I loved playing basketball with the neighborhood boys and I often beat them… not sure if that was good for their self-esteem. HA! I loved playing 4 square, volleyball, making forts in the woods behind my house. As I got older I loved playing volleyball and basketball for my school. Due to family issues, I stopped playing sports and focus more of my time on my sisters and brother.
Pricing:
- 10-year Anniversary sign starts at $99 printed on tin and all the words are custom specific to you
- Farmhouse Decor signs starting at $12.50
- Wedding Vows starting at $69
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.madikaydesigns.com/
- Phone: 214.476.6846
- Email: contact@madikaydesigns.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/madikaydesigns_mkd
- Facebook: www.Facebook.com/MadiKayDesign
- Twitter: www.etsy.com/shop/MadiKayDesigns
- Yelp: www.amazon.com/handmade/madi-kay-designs
Image Credit:
Rachel McGowan – www.guidingarrowphotography.com, Lisa Michelle Photography http://lisamichellephotography.com
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
