Business

3 Ways to style a Graphic Tee with United Monograms

August 11, 2019

Graphic Tees have been the latest trend and I am SO here for it. What’s not to love? T-shirts are so comfy and they can be styled SOOO many different ways! I also feel like they let you express your interests - some people have their favorite band, or saying, or favorite drink or day of the week on their shirt. At United Monograms we offer SO many ‘Graphic Monogram’ tees. We truly have something for everyone! We have ones (ALOT) about coffee, drinking, teaching, some disney, some lipstick - truly a mixture of anything a woman would want! You know what the greatest thing about our ‘Graphic Monogram’ tees are? Each one is personalized for YOU with your monogram! Most of them aren’t in your face or anything - they are subtle somewhere on the shirt.. Just enough to add a cute touch! I love this ‘Girl Power’ tee that we just released - it makes me feel strong and powerful and also reminds me of all the bad ass ladies in my life! Today I am sharing 3 ways to style this ‘Graphic Monogram’ tee!

Style 1: With a skirt and tennis shoes. I love that this look is in style right now! Skirts are so comfortable. They are super feminine, flirty, and freeing. This leopard one especially had me feeling so fun I just wanted to do some spins in it! This can also be paired with heels - but when an outfit looks cute with sneakers, I always opt for the sneakers. Comfort over cuteness (most of the time) for me folks! The knotted tee is my go-to but can also just be tucked in too!

Style 2: With ripped jeans and heels. Thank goodness for high waisted jeans is all I have to say. They honestly have transformed my style for the better these past few years and me and my body are grateful they have come into my life! How cute are these ripped Mom Jeans from Target? I am obsessed. Paired with a simple heel and you have yourself a whole look!

Style 3: With leather leggings and a jean jacket. Some people only wear leggings when they have something on that covers their booty. I am not one of those people. I am a PROUD supporter of leggings as pants..and I mean proud. Find yourself a pair of nice thick high-waisted leggings, and you have yourself a pair of comfy pants with great coverage! As you may have noticed - I love tucking everything in, or knotting it. Most shirts lay on my hips in an unflattering way, so this helps with that. The jean jacket adds a little extra to the outfit, and would also be cute with a long cardigan!

I hope you liked these styles! Let me know which one was your favorite!

XOXO, Shelby

Shop Graphic Tee Here

Shop Leopard Skirt Here

Shop Leggings Here

Shop Sneakers Here

Shop Heels Here

Shop Jeans Here

5 Reasons to Celebrate The Small Wins

June 12, 2019

This past weekend United Monograms reached another milestone - 100K followers on Instagram! To celebrate, we got some balloons and a fun cake - took some cute photos and enjoyed the cake with our team. As a business account, 100K may not seem like the biggest thing, but I’ve learned over the years it is so important to celebrate the small victories! We work so hard to achieve our big goals, we need to stop and celebrate the small wins along the way. Whether they are business or personal goals - it is so important. Today I’m sharing 5 reasons to celebrate ALL the small wins.

It makes you feel proud! If you are like me, you don’t like to boast about yourself often. I don’t like being cocky or over-confident but I’ve learned over the past few years it’s totally fine and necessary to say “I’m proud of myself” every once in awhile. Be proud of your accomplishments and share them with pride! I’m so proud of our team!
It allows you to look back and reflect on everything it took to get to this milestone. It has been quite the Instagram journey. Not only has our business changed a little, Instagram is always changing as well. I remember starting our business account and being excited when we reached 1000 followers! Here’s a look at some of our first posts. (Haha big gossip girl and bows guy over here) I will write another blog post in the future about growing an IG account, but consistency is key.
It builds your confidence. It makes you feel good about yourself! We are so hard on ourselves. I’m sure in the past week you’ve gotten down on yourself for something you didn’t accomplish, but have you patted yourself on the back for something small you HAVE accomplished? Start celebrating yourself more, and your confidence will grow!
It motivates you to keep going. It pumps you up! As Sean would say, “Let’s f*%!ing goooo!” After you stop to celebrate for a moment, it’s time to start planning for the next goal or milestone.
You deserve it! As I’ve said in the previous reasons, you need to celebrate YOU and your accomplishments. You deserve to celebrate. What’s the point of working hard to achieve goals if you don’t celebrate them?! You deserve some cake. You deserve a mani/pedi. You deserve a cocktail. Treat yourself when you achieve your goals!

“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” – Oprah

XOXO, Shelby

Shirt: United monograms

Skirt: Free People

Balloons: Cannonborough Collective

Earrings: Tiny Tassel

United Monograms Summer Collection

May 29, 2019

We recently released our new summer collection at United Monograms and I am obsessed! Being a very small business, our product department is pretty much a 2 man show – myself and Rachel, who is also our amazing photographer among many other things! Sean helps out too, more so making sure we have everything done in a timely manner and overseeing the collection as a whole. All of us are very hands on in the product planning and designing. That being said, sometimes it is hard coming up with and designing new things! We try to come out with at least 4 seasonal collections (each having anywhere from 40-100 items), and also new collections for certain holidays. Some collections are better than others, and some collections or products we personally like better than others. This collection is definitely one of my favorites so far and think my personal style shows through it!

My favorite product that I’ve been wearing the most the past few weeks is our Monogrammed Retro Coffee Sweatshirt. Who doesn’t love a comfy, classic crewneck? The colors in this design are so fun! It can match so many different bottoms too. I am wearing a small in this. I usually do smalls in sweatshirts for the summer since I’ll wear them with shorts, and usually want my fall/winter sweatshirts in mediums to wear with leggings!

Top ♥ Shorts

I posted this look on my feed and y’all seemed to love it! I was so excited when I got this skirt in the mail and thought long and hard about which one of our tops I wanted to pair it with! It came down to this Rainbow Striped tee or our Big Print Leopard shirt. I chose the rainbow striped tee because I think it is the perfect summer look! If you are going on vacation or planning a weekend brunch, this look will be so cute. It’s also SO comfy!

Top ♥ Skirt ♥ Shoes

How cute is this Lobster crewneck?! I’m not sure why but something about it is just adorable to me! I definitely think the red thread against the light blue is so pretty and really pops! It reminds me of being at the beach or on a boat which are both very pleasant vibes!

Top ♥ Headband

Lastly is the ultimate summer vibes tee! It has all of my summer favorites on one shirt. I love all the pretty colors in it, you can really pair it with so many different bottoms! I had these light purple shorts that matched perfectly.

Top ♥ Shorts ♥ Purse

I hope you check out our new Summer Collection and love it! Let me know what you think!

XOXO, Shelby

E-Commerce Conference

April 14, 2019

This past week Sean and I attended an E-Commerce Conference called Modern Commerce here in Charleston held by eHouse Studio and Shopify Plus. I had the opportunity to listen to people speak from brands like Magnolia, Southern Tide, Draper James, Gerber and Kopari to name a few. These are brands I look up to so I was super excited to listen to them speak and try to pick up some wisdom! It was a great networking event for United Monograms and got us thinking about a lot of things we can improve on, as well as made us realize things we are doing a great job at.

After listening to these speakers, a few things stuck with me and have me thinking more about them today. 1. Content is KEY and we need to be doing more of it. 2. People want RELATABILITY and 3. FAILURE is not always a bad thing and EVERYONE is failing in some way even when everything looks perfect via social.

The one speaker who really resonated with me was Helen Nightingale, the Director of E-Commerce for Draper James. Maybe seeing Reese Witherspoon’s face all over the slideshow drew me in, but her presentation was awesome and so thought provoking. The title of her presentation was ‘Dress for Success: How One Dress Changed Our Business.’ Helen talked about their best selling dress and why it sold so well. They literally cannot keep stock of it since they released it in Fall 2018. Here is the dress that they cannot keep stock of for months and months. They have had to re-order it many times. Can you guess WHY this dress or more specifically, this photo of this dress, did so well?

‘Celebrities, they’re just like us!’ right? Everyone loves when celebrities feel RELATABLE. In this photo, Reese is in the kitchen, hair looks a little messier (even though it still looks perfect!), looking comfy and casual. All women feel like they can relate to this photo. This makes them feel like they can look and feel great in that dress too! Draper James uses a ton of photos with Reese in them, but this one just really spoke to the people! Most of their photos range from 3,000-6,000 likes, this one almost reaching 19,000. This reiterated the fact to me that people want to see the relatable stuff. Yes, a pretty picture is a pretty picture – but at the end of the day people want to feel a connection. For United Monograms, I know we can show more of the behind the scenes, day to day, not so pretty things. Also, in the photos we’re posting – people want to see the item being worn at normal everyday life events and activities not always just pretty people posing. On the business and analytics side – if something works well, you have to break it down piece and piece and figure out why it worked so well and try that strategy again in the future! They took this photo, broke it down, and used this in their marketing strategy moving forward. It is crazy how one image can change your whole business, but that is the beauty of Instagram and social media!

Another great presentation was done by the CMO and Director of Guest Services at Magnolia. Hearing about how great it is having Chip and Joanna as your boss was fun, but the main thing I learned from these guys was that even the big/super successful companies make the same dumb, silly, idiotic-feeling, money looseing mistakes we do on a daily basis. The name of their presentation was ‘Fail Smarter’ which is something everyone can learn to do. They started off by reading us the ‘Magnolia Manifesto’ that is such an awesome mantra.

I think everyone can relate to this and only have positive thoughts when they read it. My favorite line from this manifesto is: “We believe that failure needn’t be a negative thing; rather, we learn from our mistakes and fail smarter next time” We have already had a lot of practice with this. Going through some ups and downs over the years has been tiresome, but we always get smarter. We know not to give up when those rough patches hit. It was nice to hear it reinforced over & over that ALL companies make mistakes. Making mistakes is OKAY, as long as you learn from them.

The last presenter, the CEO of The Goulet Pen Company, talked all about CONTENT and why it is so important to be creating it constantly. This guy and his wife have been making content about FOUNTAIN PENS for years and years… and people actually care about it! In fact, 130,000+ people subscribe to their YouTube Channel. Very impressive. They found a niche and now have a large following of fellow pen lovers. This shows that people will start to care if you keep putting it out. Consistency is key. They have over 1,500 videos on YouTube. They went back and showed us their first video from years ago. It is safe to say they just went for it when they first started, and didn’t wait for ‘the perfect time to start’. You can see their set up, camera, audio was not the best – and that’s okay! They decided they wanted to make some content, and just started recording. Very authentic and cool to see!

Overall, the conference was a great event for us to attend. It struck up a lot of conversations and we have a bunch of things we’ll be working on moving forward! It’s all about execution, daily effort & consistency over long periods of time. We will take some of the lessons from the conference and continue to grow United Monograms – We know one day we will have a great success story that other young business can study & learn from!

XOXO, Shelby

How We Started United Monograms

April 2, 2019

The path to this company didn’t start with Monograms. It’s safe to say that Monograms found us in a way.

Where to begin?! I graduated college in 2011 with an Elementary Education degree. I was never really passionate about teaching - it was just something I thought I would enjoy and be good at. I knew deep down teaching was not going to be what I did for the rest of my life. During my first years as a kindergarten teacher in Philadelphia, I started helping Sean with his early business endeavors. He was having some early success selling tees & tanks to different audiences he was building through social media. Twitter was HUGE at the time and he had a few growing accounts of 20-50k followers where he would sell. (Back when your followers actually saw what you posted and advertising was FREE!) He had enough success to start working on the business full time. It was really cool to see how social media had such a large impact on a small business, and that was only the beginning of the social media craze. Our first main business was called United Tees.

I started helping in many different ways - most of all bringing a girl’s perspective & adding ladies designs and shirts to the websites. We spent most of our nights and weekends learning how to use Photoshop, Shopify (our selling platform), and the ins and outs of starting a business (& still learning every day!) One of our audiences was American Pride themed, and welcomed a very country/southern audience. This is where monograms come into play! Many of the female customers would ask us “Can I get a monogram on this?” To be honest, I really didn’t know what a monogram was. Being from the north, they weren’t really a thing. I remember seeing an engraved jewelry dish my friend had from her sister's wedding and I was always confused why the initials were in the wrong order! It is funny to think about being monograms are my whole life now. Through some research, we discovered that monograms were worth a try. I convinced Sean to get me a $500 at home embroidery machine. Through lots of patience, and many youtube videos, I learned how to work the embroidery machine.

I was so pumped when I made my first successful embroidered monogram sweatshirt! It was a grey quarter zip sweatshirt with neon pink thread (STILL one of our best selling products!) I soon wanted to monogram anything and everything. We started to notice how popular monograms were (especially in the south & east coast). It was like a whole world existed we never knew about. There weren’t too many monogram companies focusing on their direct selling through e-commerce, only smaller mom & pop shops. First we created a ‘Monogram’ section on United Tees and a store on Etsy.

After a few months and a lot of success, I wanted the monogrammed items to have its own site and own identity. I didn’t want to sell on a “boyish” site that had navy and red as their colors and had ‘merica f* yeah’ shirts (haha) on it. I wanted to build a brand that was feminine, pink, and pretty! That’s when United Monograms started and the beginning of an amazing ride.

The workload soon consumed my nights after teaching, and weekends. I would even call off work to get the orders out (whoops!) I really fell in love with building this business, and brand. It was time to make a decision about my future and my career. Sean had so much confidence and faith in me, us, and our little business. With the early success we had and the drive I saw in Sean to grow the business - it was an easy choice to quit teaching and work on this thing full time. Most of our friends and family were super supportive, but there were definitely a few people that thought I was crazy! It is a little scary not having that security and certainty of the future - but if you are passionate about something you need to take that leap of faith and go for it!

After committing to working on this business full time - we started to plan our life together. Being an online business, with not much equipment or employees at the time, we noticed that we had a rare opportunity where we could run this business from anywhere! Feeling confident & adventurous, we decided to move to Charleston, South Carolina- a beautiful Southern city and a place where monograms are EVERYWHERE! You know they say ‘Great things happen outside of your comfort zone’ and I believe it took us leaving our family, friends, and everything we’ve been comfortable around to truly get this business going. We have been here since Fall 2014 and love it.

The past 5 years of growing this business have been pretty crazy with many many ups and downs. One of Sean's favorite quotes is “never get too high, never get too low” which we’ve certainly had to practice. From shipping packages out of the second bedroom of our first apartment, to renting out a trailer and hiring our first employee, to now having a second office space and 11 employees - I can confidently say that I am excited for our future as a company - I think we are destined for great things! United Monograms has taught me so many things and I am happy to continue sharing this journey with y’all!

XOXO, Shelby