From the time my sister and I were young, we believed we could do anything.
That was partly due to our upbringing; our dad was a serial entrepreneur. While owning and running our own business wasn’t something we aspired to, it was familiar territory. After all, we ran a pretty awesome shaved ice stand as kids! When we discovered the customized planners marketplace had issues, it didn’t take much for us to bet on ourselves and tackle them. Creating Golden Coil was our solution.
The idea for our company came to us just before Mother’s Day in 2015. My sister and I were students at Brigham Young University then, and we wanted to buy our mom a gift. The general idea was to get her a planner. As the mom of seven kids, she was a very organized woman: she had a gigantic wall calendar where every child was color-coded. It helped her know who needed to be where, as she always hauled us from dance to piano to volleyball. Her intense (and necessary!) calendar system ensured we got to our activities on the right days and times.
At this point in our lives, most of the kids were grown up. We’d graduated high school and moved out. Our mom no longer required the calendar she once leaned on. Still, a small planner seemed like a handy evolution in scheduling, a personalized way of organizing appointments and tasks she could carry everywhere she went.
Right away, though, we ran into problems. Planners available for purchase would start in January or July. We didn’t want to give her a present that we would have to tear half the pages out of to allow it to make sense. Also, we couldn’t decide what template would work best for our mom. She should have the choice to choose the structure of her planner.
We wanted to point her to a website where she could customize it, choosing the day it started, along with the layout and cover. But looking online, we hit all dead ends. Nothing like that existed. There was a hole in the market for planners-oriented people like us.
We knew we could solve the problem, so we started by listing every possible feature we wanted. It was important to create something beautiful and essential that people could carry around to business meetings or keep on countertops. It needed to be aesthetically pleasing and durable, too. Out with planners that had plastic coils and laminated covers; in with a sturdy, portable, beautiful planner that could withstand a year’s use.
We started reaching out to print shops for assistance. One big challenge for the printers we contacted was that they often couldn’t create one-off products. Most only committed to large batches in the hundreds or thousands; creating a one-of-a-kind planner was sometimes doable but very expensive. Our first bid to have one made was nearly $300. Because that wasn’t feasible, the search continued and expanded. We contacted every print shop we could locate, a staggering 200+ printers.
As we continued to connect with print shops, bids would drop progressively lower. At long last, I met with a representative of a print-on-demand company and settled on a reasonable price point. With that hurdle out of our way, we needed a website next.
We started meeting with web development companies but weren’t taken very seriously as young girls with a big idea and no funding. We explained to one of those companies what we wanted our site to do, and they said they could do it, but the price tag was a million dollars. Building a site at that cost before determining proof of concept was absurd. We didn’t even know if there was a demand for this product yet.
Eventually, we connected with a development team in Provo. After paring down our features to the bare essentials and creating a short list of must-haves, the cost became manageable. The future of Golden Coil seemed much more possible, if not inevitable.
A Kickstarter growth spurt
Still, we needed money to get started, and launching our project on Kickstarter was the first step toward allowing that. My personal social media had 8,000 followers then, a drop in the bucket compared to some larger entities. Many of my followers had sizable audiences, however. When I asked if a chunk of them would share about our campaign in exchange for a prototype planner, all 80 kindly agreed to help get the word out.
When we launched our campaign, my sister had a two-week-old newborn, and I was one month pregnant with my first child. When we pushed go, I was so nervous that I ran to the bathroom and promptly threw up. What early supporters did not see was me vomiting and Michelle nursing her tiny baby. It was a wild time.
The campaign was successful and 100 percent funded, squeaking by with $150,000 of capital raised. That win needed to happen to give us the confidence we needed to keep going. It helped us decide that there would be a demand for these planners when we launched. If we’d done the Kickstarter and only sold 30 planners, we’d have known right away that people didn’t care so much about what we were doing. Luckily, it was the opposite reaction. They did care.
Tripling our goals
We began fulfilling orders and selling planners right away, but growth was limited to our social media audience. More people needed to know about what we were trying to accomplish. Once we started running Instagram ads, business dramatically changed overnight.
New customers weren’t just our friends and extended family anymore. Facebook and Instagram advertising took us far. More products were ordered, more planners were sold, a following was built, and ads generated results.
Then 2020 hit, and COVID-19 along with it. That was a weird time. While human-to-human and event companies suffered, e-commerce flourished. People weren’t spending money on travel, restaurants and experiences but were still employed and working from home. It felt like the whole world had an influx of disposable income. Our space benefited from a lack of being able to spend elsewhere, and we sold more planners than we were expecting.
TikTok helped with sales, too. At the end of 2020, a girl we didn’t know created a TikTok video about our custom planners. Everyone’s attention was online. Her post went viral and gave us the biggest spike in sales we’d ever had.
We set a sales goal and pledged to hit it by the end of 2020. We hit the goal between Black Friday (the day the TikToker’s video went live) and the end of December. Before 2021, we did it again, and it happened again after that. Sales came in at triple our original projections, and we sold out of everything, including the coils that held our planners together.
My sister and I called every entity that produced coils worldwide, but supply chain issues were rampant. The United States, Europe and South America were all out of coils. They weren’t even being made. Our printer suggested we send planners with silver coils, but we balked at that: the company is “Golden Coil,” after all. Silver wasn’t an option.
Michelle and I kept searching, calling coil factories all across Asia, often staying up all night because of the time difference. Finally, after calling factory after factory, we found a coil-producing company in China. They didn’t just have golden coils; they could air freight them to us in 48 hours.
What a relief! They sent the coil, and it was beautiful — a perfect champagne color. It reflected the name of our company better than anything we’d previously used. It was a win-win. Not only did we have a coil manufacturer that could make and send us coils quickly, but it was also a perfect gold.
That freed up our backlog and allowed us to get a lot of orders out fast. Though it was hardly our intention, running out of everything created a more intense demand than ever. Customers didn’t know how long certain styles would be in stock, leading to a crazed buying period.
Run by moms
As frenetic as that time was, it never completely overtook our lives. Our employees are all moms who work part-time at their leisure. Combining Golden Coil with motherhood is no ordinary vocational adventure. It allows us to serve our families while we create for our customers. That’s the ultimate reward.
Initially, any problem within Golden Coil felt like it had to be dealt with urgently. We now realize this as truth: there is no such thing as a planner emergency. If there’s a typo on a quote in someone’s planner or the page prints upside down, we’ll address it, but it doesn’t need to be done by yesterday. We can take a beat and tend to it once the kids go to school or down for naps.
Before, we were running ragged, trying to respond within moments of customers having issues. Now, we try to fit Golden Coil into our lives so that business does not detract from families. That’s our preferred work-life balance. Of course, we’re working hard, but 99 percent of the time, we try to prioritize our loved ones.
It’s not uncommon for us to get on a call where every single person has a child in her lap or a baby in her arms. That’s how we choose to work — in a way that prioritizes our families. That feels unique and uncommon in the business world.
I have come to realize that a few things are as urgent as we believe they are. When Golden Coil started, everything needed to be up and running now. We needed to sell products and work with influencers now. Whatever it was, it needed to happen immediately.
After several years, I now understand that everything happens in its own time. Looking back, everything that needed to be accomplished was accomplished. We have grown as a small company and done more than we ever expected we would, including implementing web features that have streamlined the creation process. It took time for us to get our supply chain in order and work the kinks out in our processes.
Finding our signature planner coil was the result of a global pandemic and a supply chain shortage. We also needed customer feedback and trial and error to determine what needed fixing. It’s important to remember that you can’t foresee all of your problems right away. Be patient — everything takes time.
