Who WE are!

Hey Girl Hey!

So, as I shared a few weeks ago, I recently attended the Rachel Hollis RISE conference.  A big part of the conference was focused on establishing goals and dreaming big.. and I have BIG goals!!!  One of them is to take our boutique community that we have and build it to include a REAL place for REAL women.  The good, the bad, the ugly — we are here for it.  Part of my big idea includes a type of blog for our community - by our community.  So, with that, this is our first one — who we are!

Our fist picture together! 

A little about Megan ~ The girl behind the beauty that is our store!  She is also the one most likely to be behind the counter helping you with your purchases.  You won’t find her in a picture or video! Megan has a retail background with a degree from Oklahoma State University in Apparel Merchandising.  She has always had a passion for retail since her very first job.  Before having her son, William, she was a golf buyer and merchandiser.  When Will was born she was able to stay home but knew she wanted to get back into retail at some point in the future.  Opening a store was what she wanted to do! Mod Market started out with home apparel parties that she did for a few years before Mike, her husband, said the clothes were taking over their house (THAT has not changed)! That was when Megan knew she had to open a store. 

A little about Jackie~ The girl behind the social media!  I am a wife to my husband, Jeremy, of 16 years and we have two girls - Jules who is 10 and Jordyn who is 8.  I am a family girl through and through and one of my childhood dreams was to own my own boutique!  When I had Jules I debated a lot between staying at home with her or going back to work.  We had saved and decided I would stay home with her, but after about 6 months I had an itch for something.  I was spending so much on monograms, so I figured I could try and do it myself.  For my birthday in 2009 Jeremy bought me an embroidery machine.  He purchased it from QVC because they had a great return policy and he wasn’t sure.  Well, it wasn’t the greatest machine and we returned it.  I tried again with a machine from the sewing studio inside of Joanns.  It was a great machine and Personalize it by Jackie was born!  At the time I was doing a ton of appliqué work — I had a full calendar but I always still had that pull for something more.

Our First Store! 

We met through monograms and apparel parties! After a recent vendor event Megan reached out and wanted to talk about an idea she had.  We met at Panera and talked about a completely different idea than the one we have now.  The very same day that Megan and I met to talk about the idea I had to run an errand by the Oviedo post office and there was a for rent sign in a free standing building.  I said "why not" and made the call that would set all of this into motion.  The building owner said he would love to rent it but could only do month to month because the building was eventually going to be knocked down by the city for road construction.  Well, that was perfect for us!  We had no idea if we would be successful or not so this was the perfect opportunity for us.  For the next 30 days we and our spouses worked tirelessly building out a room of a building to be our store.  If I do say so myself, it was fabulous. 

On our first day we made enough to pay our rent for the month and we just knew our next baby was born.  We stayed in that building for a little over a year and then it was being taken down so we had to find a new location.  We found what we thought would be the perfect location for the store and packed everything up. Our husbands loaded everything into a Uhaul and our personal vehicles. Megan & I went to get the occupancy license for the new location.  The City told us "NO."  Retail wasn't able to occupy that space unless we built a firewall.  I am pretty sure we both wanted to throw in the towel at this point!  The owner had told us repeatedly that the location was fine for retail - we already had the windows tinted, painted the interior and moved a lot of our inventory in at this point — it was a mess!! 

We contacted a realtor and she found us some new places and we selected our current location.  We got the keys and gave ourselves 3 days to turn it around into our new boutique because we had already been unexpectedly closed for a week!  We have the best crew surrounding us that jumped in and helped and we did it! 

So, that's our story... from then until now. We've accomplished more then we ever imagined in the 5 years since we first opened in that old building by the Oviedo post office paying rent month to month.

We have big ideas as we move our store and community to the next level. As we are launching here one of the ideas is this blog.  We would love to have some of our customers and friends be guest writers.  If this is of interest to you please reach out! We are so appreciative for ya’ll.