When Tiara Paul started her company Red Head Tribe Logos out of the mudroom of her house in 2018, she was 24, pregnant, and in her own words all she wanted "was to have my children wearing matching his and hers 'big sister' and 'little brother' t-shirts." At the time, they were living paycheck to paycheck, and she really couldn't afford to pay the price that was being asked by an Etsy seller, so she decided to figure out how to make them herself. "I guess I was born with that 'how hard can it be gene'," Paul said.
So she did some research. Then she had a garage sale to raise the money for equipment. "I made $500 on that sale, and it was literally every cent I had," Paul recalled.
She bought a $7 handheld iron, and a Cricut machine from Walmart, and got to work.
"Everything I made fell apart," she said. "It was awful! I remember being so upset with myself because I wasted the money on that when I should have bought diapers."
But Paul turned that anger into motivation, telling herself "you better figure it out!" Refusing to accept failure, she went back to the drawing board. "I watched Youtube videos and Facebook videos," she related, adding, "and I had to teach myself a lot because that was just before the vinyl became popular."
She cut vinyl with the cricut and ironed it on to old shirts for practice. There was a lot of trial and error involved. But soon, she was making some shirts for her kids which weren't half bad. She posted the photos and videos of her kids wearing them to social media, with a fun flare, finding she had a knack for that.
"And then, because of social media, people saw the shirts I was making for the kids," she said, and people started asking her to make some for them. "Things sort of took off from there!"
"I don't know how I've built it, honestly," she said with a shrug, raised eyebrows, and a chuckle. "I've yet to do any type of formal marketing. I think it's just the time and the effort, and then the quality speaks for itself."
After doing shirts for a while, Paul was able to buy her embroidery machine from Marilyn Sampson, who was retiring from her embroidery business In Stitches. An opportunity she was grateful for.
"And thank God for Bob Torkelson," she noted with a gesture at the massive machine "for giving me the opportunity to have a brick and mortar."
These days, there are a lot more massive machines in Paul's "brick and mortar" at 204 W. Broadway, downtown in Eagle Grove.
"I started with $500 five years ago, and just now invested in a brand new automatic press that cost more than my first house," Paul said with pride.
She, and her husband Trevor, had traveled to Las Vegas to attend a print industry expo in October of last year, looking for the right equipment to take the business to the next level. "And we stumbled upon our pretty pink equipment," Paul said with a grin. "A few months later it was delivered off the truck." With a little help from Jacob Wilde of the Eagle Grove greenhouse, who Paul credited with "coming to my rescue" to help unload the big machines from the truck.
The new equipment closes the gap, Paul explained, between their quality, which was already high, and their production capacity, which was stretched thin. "Now, with this equipment we have increased our production speed by 300%," Paul revealed.
Getting production capacity up was important to Paul, because she wants to keep her customers satisfied. "Every day we have so much gratitude for the business we've been able to build," she said, "and for the companies who have chosen to put their trust in us." And every day, Paul said, they continue to make strides to do more and more, and do it better and better, working hard at it.
Now, Paul noted, she's excited to be offering diverse services, including screen printing, embroidery, vinyl, decals, and signage. And since she's shown a knack for it, social media management, too.
"Every day we continue to build a stronger relationship," with clients, and the community. "And I firmly believe that the best is yet to come!"
