We recently connected with Ashley Garner and have shared our conversation below.
Ashley , thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
As someone who is really risk tolerant and equally unafraid of failure, there isn’t an option aside from resiliency. I also think that entrepreneurship in and of itself is an act of resilience; I compare it to running a marathon often.
I come from a long line of small, strong women who have weathered some intense personal and professional storms. Seeing them exercise their strength in times where things were really tough shaped me without even knowing it at the time.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I feel like both Nest and myself are in a period of transition. As I moved away from large scale commercial renovations, I took a pretty big gap in projects and really asked myself what it was that I wanted to do moving forward. This time of reflection allowed me to move Nest into a lifestyle renovation business specializing in furniture flips, client customs, and vintage traysure; primarily mid- century brass.
Nest has always been, at its core, a “home” business, meaning I was focusing on the more tangible, decorative parts of a home which is still a direction I’m going in moving forward. But, the more time I spent at home and the more time I spent thinking about home, and what home in an overarching sense meant to me, I started to think about arguably the single most important parts of a home— the people who live there. In fall of 2022 I launched a staging and event design offshoot and this year I’m curating a unique line of apparel, candles, perfumes, and a few other home and body centric items to really take the “refresh, restore, renovate” tagline I’ve had since the beginning in a totally new direction while remaining true to the original ideation that I started with 5 years ago.
Its been 5 years since I started this business with really no idea or game plan, just a passion for refinishing old pieces and making spaces more beautiful. Everything Nest is bringing in 2023 and beyond is a reflection of my growth and the growth of this brand along the way.
I’m incredibly proud of my Etsy store especially, and all the pieces I’ve curated and cataloged there.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I have never really been afraid to fail; I have always had the mindset that I would rather look back and know that I exhausted every option or tried the thing I wanted to do instead of looking back with a “what if.” I say a lot that everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it. It’s not always served me well, but it has taught me a lot of valuable lessons along the way.
Because of that I think I have a pretty high risk tolerance, and that is absolutely something that you have to learn about yourself and identify pretty early on; am I risk tolerant or risk averse? Knowing that about yourself will put you in a better head space surrounding what choices you’re willing to make personally and professionally.
Finally, it is imperative to know your limits and to be clear about those. I have made peace with saying “no” as a whole sentence. I have also made peace with the realization that I don’t know everything and that it is totally okay to admit that. Knowing limits also around mental health, around what your body is telling you– I am a firm believer that if you don’t pick rest days your body will pick them for you and will usually do so with catastrophic results.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
Since moving into smaller projects and more of a lifestyle brand, I have taken a huge hit to my income. On one hand, I am reading books again, I’m able to spend more time on hobbies, and I can spend a lot more time with my kids. On the other hand, I have traded job stress for financial stress and am trying to find solutions for the money discrepancies.
Contact Info:
- Website: thebestnesthome.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/bestnesthome
- Other: etsy.com/shop/bestnesthome
Image Credits
Aaron Ingram, Katherine Birkbeck
