Interview with Dawn from PartyBluPrints
I caught up with Dawn (pictured on the left with her partner Elizabeth) from PartyBluPrints while she was spending the summer at the Jersey Shore with her three boys and her husband. She was enjoying the day at the beach with her family and was kind enough to come home to speak with me on the phone. I was looking forward to doing this interview as Dawn and I had spoken a few times and we'd started to form a great working relationship. She has a lot of energy, a great business mind and well, she's just fun to talk to.
I found her through Twitter, and I really liked her blog so I reached out to her. I think PartyBluPrints is up to something really fun, and very useful to all of us who are so busy we don't know how to plan the next hour, let alone put together a great dinner for friends. PartyBluPrints has some really fun ideas.
Below, Dawn talks about how they got started, she gives tips and advice for people starting out, and you may even find yourself inspired by her moxie.
Sarah: How did you guys start?
Dawn: I left my job on Wall St. I worked on a trading floor for 10 years. I loved my job, but it moved to Connecticut and I couldn’t follow it. My husband and I knew we wanted more kids, and I had gone through a few miscarriages. So I just knew I had to pick between my job and focusing on having more children. And fortunately at the time, my husband made enough money that I could stop and I did completely stop for a while.
But then I was just restless, I really was. I wanted to work. One of the things that I noticed looking around my neighborhood at other women, was that entertaining sort of left our lives when our kids were young and we couldn't quite figure out a way to do it that wasn't really stressful. One of my neighbors, my girlfriend Elizabeth, my co-founder and partner in the business, and I started hosting some parties together. And people started saying, "Wow, this is really nice, I feel like I went on vacation for a little bit here! I had a really great time and how did you do this?"
So we started writing down what we thought made a party successful. And a lot of it came down to planning ahead and getting to be a guest at your own party. Because really it’s about getting to spend time together. It’s not so much about what’s on the table or what food you ate, but you remember the laughs and the conversations. If you think about it, when you think about having a great time at a party, you never think that it was because of the food.
So we started writing this down, and we looked at it and we said, "Wow! These are like little blue prints!" And we figured that if the women in our neighborhood were interested in this, probably other people would be too! So we started to write them down formally, and we created our website. And we really went for it.
We pretty much did everything on our own. We had no budget, and we went through several versions of the website. It was 2007 when we came up with the name.
One thing I would want to really express to people is that when you have an idea and you think... (cont)
