We were lucky to catch up with Desi & Darren Gaither recently and have shared our conversation below.
Desi & Darren, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
Not gonna lie some days its hard. The beauty of owning our business though is we can experiment, and that’s exactly what we do. We take classes and will go online and look at patterns and new quilt lines. Recently Desi took an oversized fabric bow making class and it got us thinking outside of the box on how we can offer not only the bows but level them up for customers front doors.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
We own a speciality quilt shop that specializes in one of a kind items including quilts, bags, mug rugs, door sized fabric bows, and quilted capes.
Everything we carry is made by us and one of a kind with all fabrics and notions being sourced by either women owned or veteran owned companies.
What makes us unique is that not only will you get a one of a kind customized product but we work with a seamless designer that makes us one of a kind seamless files for fabric printing. That means that we are able to make truly unique popculture and tiki items that you wont see anywhere else. Recently she made us an NCIS Origins file that you wont find anywhere else and we can take that file and use it for anything our customers want from quilts to bags to cardigans.
We do a live sale on Facebook every Thursday where we offer special discounts and product sales.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Being a husband and wife team we each bring different slill strengths to the tables.
Desi brings her perfectionism, time management and quilting designs to the table which allows us to not only produce beautiful and unique products, she also makes sure we always hit deadlines.
Darren brings his art background, out of the box thinking and his military training to the table. This has brought to the table unique ideas, fixes when we weren’t sure of the next steps and figuring out fixes when we were stumped on next steps.
For those early in your journey trying to improve there skills its ok to fail! We know that sounds crazy but we had a few idea fails where we went back to the table and we were able to work through it and go ok this is where we failed, what can we do differently. We have several products, including the Darren Bags, which wouldn’t have existed if we hadn’t failed at a different design first.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
We are always down for a good collaboration or partnership!
When we are looking for collaborators its someone who wants to build on what we offer, so we can release a comprehensive product together. So if they offer coffee mugs, we can do a bundle together that has one of our mug rugs. Another idea is they offer a cookbook and its bundled together with one of our Rock A Hula Aprons.
For a partnership we have had discussions about working with a brick and mortar that would be interested in carrying our product in store.
If people are interested they can DM us on instagram or send us an email.
Instagram: @ddtropicaltradingco
Email: [email protected]
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ddtropicaltradingco.com
- Instagram: @ddtropicaltradingco
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550635367752
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@ddtropicaltradingco
- Other: Email: [email protected]
Image Credits
All pics taken by us
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
