Hey everyone! We are so excited about taking you all on this journey with us. This has already been an incredible week and we feel like it’s taken off, and we are chasing this incredible dream that is becoming a reality. We are so incredibly grateful for the endless support that the community has provided for us since we began. It’s actually kind of a funny story of how we started.
Dria: Okay, so I’ll tell this part because Halima swears she doesn’t remember the whole story. It started with a random phone call along the lines of…
Halima: “Okay, so I’ve had this idea. Since we grow all these different herbs, why don’t we try to make our own teas?”
D: “Okay, I like the sound of that!”
H: “And since we grow our own stevia, we can do different blends and make sweet and regular versions!”
Halima and I came up with a lot of business ideas in a very short time-span. We’ve already planned on becoming immigration lawyers, opening up different businesses, and more. I had this business plan filed away with those, just waiting on the opportunity. We knew that this would be more attainable than the others and prepared little by little. I would send Halima various logo ideas, we started drying and grinding herbs, and bought some cute little bags as a trial run.
Then the opportunity came. My cousin, Tammy Herod, asked me to make her a flyer for her organization’s showcase market a few months away (it would be really interesting to put her information at the bottom of the blog so interested people can contact her). The day before the market, she asked me to pick up her banner from the print shop and I stopped at Halima’s house on the way. When I explained what I was doing, Halima’s eyes filled with excitement and she started talking a million miles a minute.
H: “Dria. We NEED to sell our tea at this market. This is what we’ve been waiting for!”
D: “Tomorrow? Like sell the tea at the market tomorrow?”
H: “I know you’re freaking out but we can do this. We already have our first recipe, a logo, and bags.”
So we signed up as vendors in the market, anticipating that we would make the vendor fee from what we sold that day. We ran to the print shop, not only for Tammy’s banner, but to get some labels and logos printed expeditiously, all thanks to Peyton at DocuMart (we love you, Peyton). We spent the night stuffing little tea bags with herbs, then stuffing our bigger bags with tea bags. Our favorite drama queen, Bella, “helped”. And by helped we mean begged for tea and watched tv while we kept stuffing.
The next day, we did better than we could have anticipated at WOWE’s Showcase Market. A week later, we ran out of our first tea blend and began scrambling again to gather the last of the herbs before Mississippi’s indecisive weather ripped them out of the ground. And now, here we are trying to catch up with our business that took off faster than we could have imagined.
We have so many more secrets in the works that we are excited about and we hope that you all follow us as we adventure through this world as black women entrepreneurs. We will share how we are growing, we will cry when we have bad experiences, we will laugh and share all our joys with you all. Most of all we will revel in this opportunity that has presented itself to us. We plan to update our blog weekly as our schedules allow in hopes that you all grow as attached to Justevia as we have.
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