OLINE EXTRA: Q&A with Emily Eggebrecht

How do you balance owning a small business with having a family life that includes five young children?

It is wild. But wanting to have the family life, wanting to have it all, means there’s sacrifice somewhere. So, we haven’t been traveling very much, but I did get to go to three jewelry shows last year, and Ben’s going to go to New York coming up. We have to really prioritize what we really want to do since time is the biggest resource that we’re lacking in.

How do you and you husband, Ben, work together? How do you play to your strengths?

Ben heads up a lot of the marketing side of things. He’s a connector. He’s a people guy. He just loves to meet with people in the store and get interrupted, whereas I’m pretty type A. I have my schedule. I don’t want to be interrupted. So, it’s a really good balance for us but there’s definitely challenges.

Ben and I met at Belmont University which is right down the road from our storefront. He majored in entertainment industry studies and worked for about a year in digital marketing. He was also waiting tables. He’s always had a strong passion about hospitality and that relationship between bartender and guest, if you will. So he’s very passionate about the experience that people have when they come to our store and the storytelling of the customer experience on e-com, and how people experience us on social media.

We’re kind of like a weird puzzle piece. Because when it comes to our team, I do take a big leadership role but then I become reclusive in my own way to do the product design. I also am passionate about the brand and overall creative direction, so I focus on that a lot. I’m also running payroll and, making financial decisions. So working both sides of my brain.

Toward the beginning of the week, I’m working from home a lot and then Wednesdays I have meetings with our production manager, our sales manager and Ben, and then I usually do client work on Fridays and Saturdays.

Where did your interest in jewelry originate?

Dad gave us jewelry for Valentine’s Day. And then when I graduated high school, my grandpa, who was a very frugal man, took me to a jewelry store to pick out whatever I wanted. And since I was a middle child of three girls, my sister had already had that trip to the jewelry store. So I had two years to think about what I wanted. It was no surprise to me. I picked a little heart diamond ring and it was special because he’s a very frugal man and I was shocked that he was buying us jewelry! So over the years jewelry meant so much to me and when I moved to Nashville I worked at a small local business, a makeup store, and started experiencing small business in Nashville.

On the side, I would make jewelry. And I had never sold it, but people started asking me, where’d you get that necklace? And I had a hard time answering because I was like, well, I got this piece at the Nashville Farmers Market or the Nashville Flea Market, and I got this chain from Michael’s.

I didn’t know what to say. And I was like, man, I really need to work on how I’m going to explain where I got in it. So, it kind of creatively unfolded into making a necklace collection. And then I launched online.

I realized that the product design is what I really loved. So I ended ended up building a website and finding a name. And I loved the branding creative project around that. And then pretty quickly, I knew I liked craft fairs.

When I first started, I found a desk at a local coworking space where people were woodworking and clay working and all these different kinds of trades. I rented a desk there for $150 a month. And then I ended up using clay in one of my collections. I’d collaborate with the other people. For a while, I was using the woodworker to make cool wooden boxes.

What kind of jewelry were you making?

My jewelry was a little more eclectic, one of a kind, and then when I started making stuff for everyday wear it was a lot more minimalistic and simple. And I loved that the designs were something you can just live in and they matched everything. I still have that in our jewelry line today 12 years later. You can buy things that you can wear every day that are simple gold or twisted, but then you also find things that are pretty interesting, like conversation starters.

How did your hobby evolve into a professional career?

I met someone who let me apprentice with her. I found out about New Approach School, which is here in Franklin. So I’ve taken many, many classes there. And now we send employees there, or we hire people that graduate from there.

I also went to GIA, remotely, and I went to GIA to do my lab class in Carlsbad. I’ve been working remotely like that, or finding the right classes to continue to educate and build on my own skills all the while.

Now we’re in a 3,000-square foot space and our jewelers are in the back and then we have our showroom in the front. It’s our headquarters, where we do mostly everything.

Do you have any hobbies?

I wrote a children’s book! I used to work every Saturday and I would do about six engagement ring appointments or up to nine, depending on how many I could squeeze in. And then I would go home and the kids would be like, read us a book and tell me an original story. And so, I feel like it came out of talking about diamonds all day and then rhyming a lot and dreaming up characters. It took me about two years to really finish that book and get it illustrated. I have a friend from Belmont, who is a book illustrator, and she was willing to do that book. I self-published that book and I have a second book in the works. So that’s kind of my hobby, just thinking through the new storyline and the characters and that sort of stuff.

What does the name of the store mean to you?

The name came from a Bible verse.

My family has gone to Colorado for family vacations a few years in a row and I was in the process of trying to think of this brand and there’s beautiful wildflowers in Colorado in August. I went through a few different name ideas and then I was like, what if it has to do with something outside because that’s what I’m really inspired by? And the combination of that being like the Bible verse about just going confidently, not worrying so much and just taking it a step at a time.

That’s how I felt about starting a business. Fear had driven so many of my decisions in life at this point, I was like, there’s really nothing that can go wrong here. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with my life at 22. I felt like this will be a testament to walking forward in faith that something will work out here.

It’s timeless because even now with decision-making that’s still a verse that I love to go back to.

A lot of people used to think that I did wedding flowers, and I love the subtlety of the name because we have had some issues here and there with security. At first, I did say yes to doing wedding flowers because I just needed the money. So, I would do people’s wedding flowers too.

Why did you abbreviate Wildflowers in the name?

Well, that is not a charming story. It just simply did not fit in an Instagram handle.

How did you grow your team?

A year after I started making jewelry, I decided to hire a part-time person to help me answer emails while I was making jewelry. Over time, it became a question of, do we hire in operations or production or customer service? We have about 12 people now.

We have two jewelers and then four full-time salespeople and one part-timer. And then we have two operations people and myself and my husband. And we work with outside people for marketing right now. We’ve always prioritized having an in-house jeweler or more than one and having all of that being done in-house. We haven’t always offered traditional repair but we do offer that now and it’s a smaller part of our business, about 10% but I really like being able to offer that.

So that’s our team right now. But we grew it slowly.

Do you have any pets?

People ask if we have a dog and we don’t have time to take care of a dog, but we have fish. We just got a fish tank this year and it’s been a new thing for our kids to feed them and take care of them.

What do you do for fun with the kids?

With the four boys, they need to be outside. We have a creek in our front yard, and for Valentine’s Day, I got them fishing nets.

That’s what started the fish conversation in the beginning, because they wanted to be fishing every day. And they wanted to catch the fish and keep the fish. And I was like, we can’t keep the fish from the creek, but we can buy fish. So that’s what started it.

One of our twins just loves rocks. They all have treasure boxes in their rooms, and they trade rocks at night. He finds stuff at school, in the playground. He brings little rocks home and asks me if it’s a real gem. He’s very confident that he’s found a gem. Lately, he’s been finding little CZs. Maybe they fell off of a girl’s shoe or something. And so he’s been coming home and asking me if it’s real. And I’ll tell him, I have to take it to work and test it.