#22: Creating Your Joyful Vision with Ericka Perry, CEO & Founder of The Stork Bag
From the day Ericka Perry, CEO and Founder of The Stork Bag, started her business, she had a very specific vision for where her product would be featured, the 5-star reviews she would receive, the dream office she would create, the people she’d love to be on her team, and the money she would make! She even had a globe to symbolize her national brand.
Her strong vision helped her birth a thriving business!
Today she shares:
How she turned her vision board into reality.
The kind of mindset that all entrepreneurs must have if they want to succeed in their business.
So, if you're someone who is looking for serious inspiration to turn your vision (or the one you're about to make...) into reality, this episode is for you!
Learn more about Ericka’s business here or check her out on Instagram @mommyceo.
Are you a visionary entrepreneur who wants to create change with your company in the world? If so, I want to let you know about a free masterclass that I just wrapped up. In this short but powerful training, I teach you exactly how to create a brand that inspires the hearts and minds of your audience and invites them into massive action. These are the very same frameworks that I've used to help my own private consulting clients and national companies you know and love, spread their mission, launch expansion, and accelerate influence. To join in, visit https://joybrandcreative.com/movement.
Listen to the Show:
Laura (00:00):
This is the Scale with Joy show, episode 22: creating your joyful vision with Ericka Perry.
(00:10):
Welcome to the Scale with Joy show, a podcast about scaling your company while living your most purposeful life, because here's the thing: there are no rules to say you can't grow a massively profitable empire and have joy in the everyday. My name is Laura Meyer and let's get started.
(00:35):
Ericka Perry, CEO and founder of the Stork Bag, knew exactly what she wanted to create. She had a very specific vision for not only what her product would be, but where it'd be featured and how many five star reviews on Google she would get. And she even had a globe in front of her symbolizing her national brand before she even made her first sale. Today, she talks about how she turned her big vision into reality and the type of mindset that all entrepreneurs must have if they want to succeed in your business. So if you're someone who's looking for some serious inspiration to turn your vision into reality, you are going to love Ericka Perry, up next on the Scale with Joy show.
(01:16):
I am here with Ericka Perry and she has some amazing nuggets to share with you. So welcome, Ericka. Thank you for coming here.
Ericka (01:24):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited.
Laura (01:27):
Ericka, would you mind just sharing a little bit about your background and what brought you to today?
Ericka (01:31):
Yeah, absolutely. So I am a mom of three little boys. I'm a wife and I am a business owner. I feel like I'm an entrepreneur by passion. And I say by passion, because even when I was in corporate America, I would always look at things and I'm like, I could do this better. We could do it like this and we can do it like this. And of course, you know, in corporate America, you don't have the flexibility to do that. So when I first started my business, which was mommy made services in 2012, initially it was supposed to be a company that connected domestic assistance with busy families like mine. And that didn't work out that well.
(02:07):
But then in 2014, my best friend was pregnant at the time with our first baby. And I had three and, you know, I wanted to build her a care package because she had a rough pregnancy. I built this care package after looking on the internet and not really seeing anything at all out there for pregnant women. And when I sent it to her, she loved it. And I think at that time, you know, Oprah says the aha moment. I remember going to my husband and I'm like, there's no care packages on the market for pregnant or postpartum women. And he's like, oh, okay. You know, and I'm like, I want to create it and he's like you should. So, you know, after some brainstorming, I'm like, what do you think of when you think about pregnancy and both my husband and I are like stork.
(02:50):
And I feel like that's around the time that subscription boxes were really becoming popular. So instead of a box, I kind of want it to think outside of the box. And I want it to really focus on keepsakes. That's really the story of, the short story of how the Stork Bag was started. I started the Stork Bag off of a personal need off of really witnessing it, a gap in the market and set a goal for myself or selling that 100 bags within the first year. And we did that within three months and I knew I had something. And, and from there we've grown, it's almost five years and the Stork Bag has really taken off.
Laura (03:24):
That's so amazing. So I have so many questions. I want to point something out to the listeners, almost every single person on this summit who has seven and eight figure businesses, it wasn't their first business. Okay. It wasn't their first business. So if you're in that moment right now where you're like, maybe this door is closing for me, just be encouraged by that, that you keep hearing the same story over and over again to Ericka, when you were going into it the second time, right. Where you kind of feeling like, was there any fear in you of like, this didn't really go the way I was hoping the first time and now I'm back at it.
Ericka (03:59):
Yeah. You know what? I wouldn't use the word fear, but I would say there was some apprehension for sure. That my first business had put so much into it. And it was one of those things, anyone who has started a business, you know, how it feels when you take that idea from out of here and you put it into some tangible form, whether it's a service that you're offering or a product that you're creating. So I put so much into that and to close it and not really close because we ended up making that our umbrella for all of our other brands. But at that time, it was like, okay, I'm going to have to, you know, can this and figure out what it is that I want to do. And so when the stork back, the idea came about, it felt right. It felt really, really good. It felt right. And like I said, the first time I had not set a goal for myself. So I didn't really know what it was that I was trying to achieve as far as success goes.
(05:01):
The second time I set that goal, because I knew that I needed some type of roadmap to guide me and let me know, is this going well, should I, you know, can this in the beginning? Or should I put years into it kind of like what I did with my first company. So there was some apprehension, but when I had those goals in place, it kind of provided a roadmap for me. And so that kind of alleviated a little bit of that, that apprehension of, or even that scariness right in the beginning.
Laura (05:30):
Yeah. And then as you were advancing towards those goals, what are some of the thoughts that you chose to believe about what this new company could be?
Ericka (05:39):
Yeah. You know what, I am a very, very, very strong proponent of thoughts become things. A lot of people first who had as law of attraction, whatever you refer to it as for me, it's life. This is my reality. And so I know for a fact that I'm a co-creator of my reality. And since I know that, I know that my thoughts are literally shaping the world around me. And so what I did with that was whenever I set my goals, I created vision boards. And on my vision board, I had exactly what I wanted to manifest, as far as my business, personal, all of those different things. And my thoughts, yes, there were days where I was just like, oh gosh, not again. I, you know, I don't want this to go under, but I had to pull from source. And I had to pull from those really strong thoughts that I had in me that said, you can do this.
(06:37):
This is a multimillion-dollar company, even though I was only making a couple of hundred dollars a month. And knowing that this is the best pregnancy gift ever, everyone loves your product. You have a five-star product. And I keep on telling myself, this is just like a little child I'm talking child, where I would be like, this is a multimillion-dollar brand. All celebrities love your product. You know, moms love your product all around the world. Your, your product is the number one pregnancy subscription in the entire world. And I'll keep telling myself this until I started to believe it. And when I started to believe it, then I started to see everything fall into place.
Laura (07:14):
So as you scale, it's one thing for you to have these thoughts. What about your team? Like, is this something that you instill into your team?
Ericka (07:23):
It is. So, you know, as the leader of an organization, you always want to set the tone. And so for me, my foundation, which would be the people that I start out with my team that grows with the company, it's very important. That not only do we believe that this is way bigger than we can ever imagine, but we act as if already. So when we only have one or two people on our team and we weren't really doing big numbers, we were having monthly meetings. We were doing weekly briefings. We were acting as if we were already running a successful brand. And in doing that, eventually you shape a person into feeling the same way, and we're all on the same wavelength. And when you're all on the same wavelength, and you're all thinking the same thing about a particular brand product or person, eventually your world shapes around that. And that's what you begin to see. So absolutely that is a part of our team building.
Laura (08:19):
That's so neat. And so you were saying that celebrities love your product, which they do. So what celebrities have you had that endorses your product loves your product, uses it?
Ericka (08:31):
Yeah. Gosh, I just, you know, I love moms, you know, regardless if you're a celebrity or a you're in a small town, whenever someone writes into us and tells us how much she loved her Stork Bag or shares a story with us that just really warms my heart, just like a big celebrity. But if we talk about famous moms that all of us know, Khloe Kardashian is one of the first people that ran it and raved about the Stork Bag. A lot of people have mixed feelings about Khloe and all of her sisters, but I absolutely love Khloe. I think that was amazing for her to do. We did not pay her anything, and the first question that everybody had was, did you pay her to say that? And I'm like, no, I didn't. So yeah, Khloe Kardashian got on social media, she talked about how much she loved it, that went all over the place because whenever they open their mouth, all of the news and the magazines and everything covers it.
(09:29):
Joanna Gaines, who was my absolute favorite, I love her so much. She actually wrote us a personal note to thank us for her Stork Bag because she loved it so much. Ayesha Curry. Who else we have? I feel like I'm missing people. I told you I literally clump everybody together. So a celebrity is not more important to me than a mom in a small town. There has been a lot of people, there have been some reality stars and I'm so sorry, cause I don't watch reality TV, so I don't remember their name. There there's been quite a few. There's been quite a few influencers and bloggers and vloggers that a lot of us know. So it's really exciting.
Laura (10:08):
That it's really exciting. And what I want to share with everybody is whatever you feel about the Kardashians, right? Like if you can take yourself out of it and just look at it as this is great brand positioning, absolutely brand positioning. Like no matter how you feel about celebrity, you may connect with an influencer and they may have an opportunity to promote your product. And you may not follow that influencer doesn't matter for your brand. Looking at that, and again, we're talking about choosing thoughts, right. Which is such an important part of Ericka's leadership message. So actually I have a question about your vision board. I had; I had that question while you were talking. Specifically, what was on it. Can you remember?
Ericka (10:48):
Yes, I can. I can. So I had, I don't know, we're familiar with some of these publications, but I had Parents Magazine, Black Enterprise Magazine because for me, I understand the importance of putting yourself out there. I understand the importance of really saturating a market from every angle and public relations and media and all of those things are so very important. So those magazines were on my list. I wanted to be in those magazines. I wanted my face to be there. I wanted the Stork Bag to be there. Five-star reviews on Google was on there. So I had five little gold stars and I put the Google logo right above it. A globe was on there that showed the Stork Bag all around the world. Because when we first came out, it was not just a US thing. It was for moms everywhere, wherever there is a mom, that's where we went Stork Bags. So we had that on there because my goal was to sell to moms all around the world.
(11:41):
Money was on there, of course, because, no money is not the only reason why you start a business, but it's a very important reason because you want to make money. I had just a bunch of money, cash on there. And then for me, it signified me, making a lot of money with my brand. And I had a building on there at the time I was working from out of my house, down in the basement was my headquarters. We made my office one of our formal dining rooms that was in the house at the time. And so I wanted an outside office. I also had a heart with staff in the middle of it because I wanted staff that loved the product just as much as me because that's so very important. You want to have a really great team that absolutely loves your product too.
Laura (12:26):
That's pretty specific. That's very helpful. I think it will be inspirational to a lot of people that might not have one.
(12:34):
Hey there! Are you a visionary entrepreneur who wants to create change with your company in the world? If so, I want to let you know about a free masterclass that I just wrapped up. In this short but powerful training, I teach you exactly how to create a brand that inspires the hearts and minds of your audience and invites them into massive action. These are the very same frameworks that I've used to help my own private consulting clients and national companies you know and love, spread their mission, launch expansion, and accelerate influence to join in, visit joybrandcreative.com/ movement. That's joybrandcreative.com/movement. Also available in the show notes. Now, back to the show.
(13:23):
So what are some of the other ways in which you have spoken into what has materialized in your business? Do you have any other examples that come to mind?
Ericka (13:34):
I have so many. So when I first started out, I think I kind of told you a little bit about this in the beginning, I had this goal of selling 100 Stork Bags. And in my mind, I'm like, if I can sell just 100 in this first year, then maybe I can get these bigger brands to recognize me and to want to give us products and things like that. And so when I set that goal for myself, mind you at that time, I didn't have any partnerships with brands idea was to go into Bye Bye Baby and Babies R Us and all of those different things and scour those clearance racks and get as much stuff as I could to put them inside of these bags. I was doing my bags, myself, my husband and I invested in a heat press, this hard table, which was absolutely awful looking, but it held our heavy heat press. And I would go down there and I bought just like a bunch of bags.
(14:24):
I bought a thousand Stork Bags. And that also was me trying to put my mind into a place of I'm going to sell all 1000 of these Stork Bags. So I bought a thousand blank, cotton canvas bags. I got my logos created and I heat press each logo on there. And I said, okay, I set aside 100 bags in one pile. And I said, okay, I'm going to sell these 100 bags within the first year. And that was my goal. When I saw pile slowly dwindle little down without any paid advertising, I was just really on Instagram. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's happening? Like this 100 bags is almost gone. It was about three and a half, four months when that happened.
(15:07):
And we looked, and there was one bag on that little pile I thought to myself, oh, we sold 100 bags. And I remember telling my husband, I'm like, guess what? We sold 100 bags. And he's like, I knew you would. And he's just always been so confident in this, even on the days that I'm not. Cause there's still some days that I get like, Oh my gosh, what am I thinking? And so that was, that was one of the first times where I thought to myself, okay. I think, I think we may have something here, but more than that, because I really felt deeply that I could sell that 100 bags. I had said one year. But then when that happened in three months, I said, huh, maybe I need to start thinking and dreaming a little bigger.
(15:47):
And so really one of our first celebrities that received a Stork Bag, mind you, my vision for it says, celebrities love the Stork Bag. And all of this was an RnB singers girlfriend at the time. I think they're married now. I sent her a bag. I say, we, because it was me and my husband. I sent her a Stork Bag. I remember deeming her on Instagram. And I'm like, hey, can you just post the bag? If you get it, if you like it, she's like, sure. She posted that bag. She's in LA I believe. And we've got so many orders from LA and I was just like, oh my gosh. And she was like, I absolutely love it. And I was like, celebrities love the Stork Bag. You know, those little baby steps, seeing your thoughts kind of manifest into an actual reality, even if it's something small, you really should take that and really try and make that as big as you can in your head.
(16:37):
Because for me, whenever I see a little small little itch of something that I'm trying to manifest or something that in my mind is already there, I take that and I say, huh, well, if this one person says she loves it, then why can't millions of people say that they love it. And so, yeah. So there's been a lot of different stories. I think I like to share that first story, because I feel like that's an inspiring piece of the beginning of entrepreneurship, especially when you have a product, if you Google me and you'll see a lot of different articles and podcasts and stuff, where I talk about it more, I don't want to take up too much of the time because I want to share more.
Laura (17:12):
Yeah, you absolutely should. You know, your husband also teaches this, which I didn't know until I started looking at like your Instagram and everything, and I was like oh cool who is she married to? And then I was like, oh my gosh, he teaches this. This is so good. So they can dig into that too. If you're not familiar with him. And he has a pretty, pretty big following, the biggest following in YouTube history or something like that?
Ericka (17:38):
Yeah, he does, he has the biggest self-help cannel in YouTube history.
Laura (17:40):
Yeah. It's amazing. It's cool. It's, he's teaching it, you're doing it right. I have a question about this, about manifestation. So anybody who's new to this balance manifesting something like really, really gripping onto what you want to see happen and being open to possibility, like something you weren't totally expecting. Because I think sometimes if you get too literal, you might accidentally block out something that's showing up for you, right?
Ericka (18:09):
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know what? There is no concrete answer to that. It's going to have to be really something that you have to do personally and individually, I can tell you for me, I used to work in a nonprofit sector where I dealt with substance abuse, patients and clients and things like that. And we always talked about people, places and things and changing those. And I think the most important thing, whenever you are manifesting, whenever you are looking at, what your life is right now, and you dream of something even bigger and greater than where you are right now, you have to begin to change those people, places and things.
(18:48):
And when I say people, a lot of people were like, but you know, I have a lot of negative people around me. And when I share my dreams, people kind of shoot it down. Well stop sharing your dreams with those people. And if you can, you know, try to close off the conversation with the negative people, because if you allow it to, although you think, Oh, I'm not going to allow those people and make me feel like this, or like that subconsciously it's happening. And so when I say places, when I back, and this is more personal, but I'm happy to share it. When I look back, my husband and I, when we first started out first, got married, we were in a two-bedroom apartment one, actually one-bedroom apartment. And then we got into a two-bedroom apartment with two kids.
(19:29):
And it was, it was really hard for us. And we were working paycheck to paycheck and it was, it was really rough. And all we can always think about is my husband would say, I'm going to buy us a mansion. And we're going to have a mansion. We're going to have, you know, we're going to live on the water and all of these different things. And at the time I was like, yeah, but eventually I started to think that way. And now this is where we are. Now. We have everything that we dreamed of 9, 10 years ago. And when we look back, we're so grateful for it. And we look back sometime. And my husband's like, you realize we did this. And I'm like, we did do this. But we had to change places. We had to start to drive in those neighborhoods where we saw ourselves.
(20:14):
If it's business start to look at some of the business owners and business professionals that you admire and really start to see what they're doing, watch them, listen to them, try to mock some of the things that they tell you to do. You know what I mean? Because you're going to have to change your people, places and things to kind of fit or center around the goals that you have for yourself. So I would say really trying to guard those thoughts, because if you're so used to thinking a certain way, whether it's negative or whether it's just a limited thinking, then you're going to have to guard those sauce and try to consciously tell yourself whenever you get those negative thoughts or whenever you get those limited thoughts where you think, oh yeah, but I can't do this.
(20:58):
Start telling yourself, I can do this and try to pull from past events that have happened even if you think there are insignificant. Think about that one time, you know, when you did something that you didn't think that you could do, or when something happened where you were like, wow, that didn't really happen and really pull in those scenes in order for you to see the possibilities, because anything's possible. I'll say this before we go to the next thing it's so very important for when you look at professionals and you look at people, let's just use Oprah Winfrey as an example, we see that Oprah is a self-made billionaire or Sarah Blakely, which is who is my absolute favorite. We see her as a self-made billionaire, but you also have to see her as a human. She's a human being and nothing separates Oprah or Sarah or any of these other very successful women from you. The only thing that separates them is going to be their thoughts. If you listen to Oprah, a running theme would be, they knew they could do it. They thought I can do this. And they really acted on it. And that's what you're going to have to do. You're going to have to think bigger.
Laura (22:04):
Yup. What I love about what you're saying too, is that when you look at people that you admire, a lot of times, our ego comes into play and we immediately compare. stop the comparison and look at it like a detective, you're trying to solve a puzzle. You're trying to figure out what is it that they're taking action in that I'm not right now. And having coached a lot of business owners, me too, typically that is completely correlated with revenue, right? Like the more you can let go of that, I teach strategy to national companies, you know, and consultant strategy. But the strategy doesn't matter if this isn't where it needs to be. And it's so funny, we were talking about people in retail. Cause I do a lot of retail consulting. They say, stop blaming the weather. You stop blaming the location. You stop blaming, you know, the signage the change the manager that usually does it.
(22:58):
So Ericka, you, if people want to find out just more about you and where they can connect with you, I know your Instagram is great. I looked at it myself. So thank you Ericka, for being here. I really, really appreciate it. And thank you all for joining us.
(23:19):
Make sure to visit our website, joybrandcreative.com/podcast where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher, or RSS so that you'll never miss an episode. While you're at it, if you find value in this show, we'd appreciate a rating on iTunes or if you just simply tell a friend about it, that would help us out a lot too. Thanks so much for listening.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.