Meet Desi & Darren Gaither

We were lucky to catch up with Desi & Darren Gaither recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Desi & Darren, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

D&D started because of burnout and a love for quilting.

In April 2022 I (Desi) was suffering severe burnout in my career, bought a sewing machine and started quilting again for the first time in a decade to.copr. In July 2022 D&D Tropical Trading Co. Went live on Etsy.

Originally it was a tiny shop and that sold scrunchies, mug rugs and headbands. Darren was seeing all the cool.Tropical and Disney images available and started both creating and sourcing fabrics for 3 yard Bundles that I could turn into quilts and bags.

As D&D grew and burnout continued me and Darren had some choices to make which led to me leaving my tech job In May 2024 and running the shop full time. Being able to run the shop full time has brought my drive back.

On the weekend we review the weekly plan for me sewing, source fabric, pick and/or designs patterns and Darren takes care of administrative task that are left over from the week.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

We’re a quilt shop that specializes in Disney and Tiki inspired custom quilts. As the business has grown we have found that there was also a niche market for Country and Pop Culture products.

Everything in our shop is made by me(Desi). We pride ourselves on every product being unique. While a customer may see the same fabric on 2 items, they will never be identical.

We make sure all of our vendors are either women owned or veteran owned. With Darren being a veteran it was important that we make sure any none women owned business was a veteran owned business.

As we have gone to Market and met more of our customer base.our offerings have expanded.

We eventually hope to.become the leader in custom quilts and custom tote bags.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Darren and I each had something to bring to the table.

Darren is an artist. With that he had an.eye for colors and fabric combinations. When he has a vision he can bring it forward with creating seamless files and pattern ideas.

I can take Darren’s pattern ideas and turn them into an actual usable pattern which I then make into the physical quilt.

We recommend that you don’t try to be everything and do everything at once. Start small with showing your talent and what you can offer your customer. Remember your a boutique/Small shop and quality over quantity is what matters.

Listen to your customers when they talk. Our first market we had our quilt, s table Runners and scrunchies on a folding table and our tote bags and sandy shawls on a clothing rack. As we talked with each customer coming to our booth we learned that a lot of.them hated having to look through our table but absolutely enjoyed thumbing through the rack. We then moved some of the table.runner and quilts onto hangers and it became a conversation starter with people telling us about there grandmother’s, aunts and mothers making quilts and then asking for business cards to buy quilts at a later date. Our first Market was the 1st week of August in Dallas, TX so it was a little hot for people to be interested in quilts. They did however go wild for totes and scrunchies.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?

We started following Dany Garcia on Instagram

It’s easy to get lost in the noise of social media and everyone claiming there making millions in sales in the first 6 months, they never have a bad day or.a bad market.

Dany Garcia is a reminder that the hard work.can give you the greatest of highs and the lowest of lows. Her message filters out all that overwhelming noise

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