Learn a bit
About me
Hi, Iâm Jess- an Etsy seller turned productivity enthusiast for online business owners, and coffee-obsessed mom of 5 balancing the chaos of parenting and small business growth. From digital products and handmade creations to print-on-demand and private label brands, I specialize in simplifying workflows, optimizing strategies, and helping busy business owners get actionable growth- without the burnout.
My mission is to help YOU grow the online business of your dreams!
I’m so happy to share my story with you!
Itâs quite a long one, as Iâve been an entrepreneur since 2009! In addition to rocking the work-at-home life, Iâm also a busy mom of 5 with (just a few) health issues nipping at my heels.
So I totally get a lot of the challenges that come with building a business while trying to be a good parent, partner, friend and otherwise just keep yourself from going nuts! đ
This is my whole story. It’s the good, bad & ugly events of how I got started and the wild happenings that led me here to starting Insights By Jess. â€
For the highlights, you can also read Printify’s amazing article about me here!
You might want to grab some coffee! And no hard feelings if you want to just browse the headlines for the juicy bits. đ
before
I was an entrepreneur…
I was a mom.
Before I was a mom, I was a waitress.
I was the first person in my family to graduate high school. AND the first to go to college! But life has a way of taking you by surprise sometimes… And BOY was I surprised when I got pregnant with my oldest child at 19 years old!
Becoming a mom at 20 was a whole new, wild adventure! Even though my dreams of becoming ‘Dr Jessica’ got put on hold, I was totally focused on being the best mom, wife, and waitress I could be!
After our second child was born, things were still pretty tough for us financially. We always had food on the table, but we couldn’t always make the other ends meet.
As an added challenge, my husband and I worked opposite shifts because daycare wasn’t affordable. We were like ships passing, making use of any time where we were both home (and awake) to fit in some family time.
So when my husband suggested signing up for the US Navy, it sounded like a dream come true!
Steady paycheck? Paid relocation to somewhere close to the beach?? I mean, what did we have to lose?!
Military life brought it’s own challenges. I couldn’t find a job that was flexible enough with the hours to accomodate my husband’s long flight hours, training days, workups and deployments.
But I suddenly found myself with LOTS of spare time on my hands. Especially after the kids would go to bed and the hubby wasn’t home yet.
I often found myself making new crafts, and writing freelance articles for websites, blogs and magazines. I also went back to school to finally finish my degree!
And in those small, quiet moments of trying to keep myself busy- I discovered my love of entrepreneurship.
the
beginning…
It was around late Spring of 2009, when my third child was just a teeny baby. I found myself a little bit obsessed with a game called ‘Animal Crossing’ on the Nintendo Wii. (It was 1st Gen, but I think we’ve already established that I’m old…) After I purchased some ‘collectible’ items on Ebay for the game, and had a lightbulb moment.
I thought: ‘If other people are selling in-game collectibles, I bet I can figure that out, too!‘ *cue my Elle Woods moment*
While chatting with the lady I had purchased the collectibles from, she explained how she started and even offered to walk me through the process of how to ‘hack’ into the mainframe of my trusty Nintendo Wii and unlock all of the in-game components! (Mind you, I would be risking the total destruction of the Wii’s software to do this.)
I remember being in absolute awe of this woman- helping and encouraging a fellow aspiring female entrepreneur!
It was not only my first step into starting a business, but I found myself with a real-life role model as well.
Following in her footsteps, I opened an Ebay store. I started selling ‘hourly grabs’ for people to come into my little Animal Crossing town and gather all the collectibles their little hearts desired.
Obviously, this was not the most effective way to make money. And knowing what I know now about e-commerce, it probably wasn’t a great biz idea for SO many reasons… đ
BUT my entrepreneurial spirit was born from that moment! It was no time at all before I started selling handmade birthday party decor and birthday shirts (with iron-on decals) on eBay instead!
next
Etsy and Artfire Were Born
It wasn’t long before two new websites came about, Etsy and Artfitre. Both had the amazing intention of providing a marketplace specifically for artists and crafters!
I was in heaven, and opened my first shop on both Etsy and Artfire.
I had no idea the kind of small business growth that would soon come- or the many ways I would have to learn to balance my work and family life!
Using a cool but unknown little machine called a Wishblade and my trusty Epson Workforce printer, I started selling cutesy little party decorations. I also printed my personalized birthday designs onto iron-on decal paper.
Fun fact: Wishblade was the OG die cutting machine- before Cricut and Silhouette were invented!
It wasn’t very user friendly, but MAN was it fun!!
Pretty soon, the idea of vinyl decals started to get popular.
I quickly jumped into this niche (since I already had the machine) and started making personalized vinyl decals for walls, car windows, signs, and more!
As one of the front-runners in this product category, I was able to secure a brand deal with Origami Owl. All of their sales representatives could purchase their personalized car decals directly from me! It was a HUGE step forward for my business, and allowed me to launch my own store on an independent platform called BigCommerce.
Meanwhile, I had to do a LOT of learning about all things e-commerce! I learned about Etsy SEO and image quality, customer service and inventory management. I also had to learn everything about how to make an Etsy shop and other Etsy selling tips to succeed. My goal to become an Etsy seller was blossoming like a dream! (And keep in mind, these were the days before youtube tutorials existed.)
As my business grew, I found myself working full time to keep up with orders and make sure things were running smoothly.
So in 2014, when my husband’s military contract was up for renewal, he switched to the Reserves part time to help me with my rapidly growing business. đ
I was already making enough profits in my business to match his paycheck (woohoo!!) but my time was maxed out.
Expanding was proving to be tricky. I was kinda stuck between wanting to grow and simply not having enough time to do it all myself.
Eager to put the years of missed holidays and baby-firsts behind us, we were excited to start approaching this more seriously as a full-time business.
growing:
Hello, Amazon!
With the two of us, we now had the ability to explore NEW ideas, new products, and even new marketplaces.
One of our first steps towards expansion was to join the Amazon marketplace as third-party vendors. This would allow us to sell our vinyl decals to the masses and take advantage of a fairly new shipping model called Amazon Prime.
I got busy creating LOTS of beautiful wall decal designs. My husband helped manage inventory, handle the Amazon platform, and fulfill orders.
We registered our trademark and applied for Brand Registry protection. This allowed us to operate as an official private-label business without as much risk for competition.
Both our Amazon and Etsy stores were growing quickly, and we watched our profits soar! đ„ł
As our Amazon business continued to grow, we made the choice to focus solely on growing our Amazon store. We expanded our inventory to both Canadian and Mexican markets. We hired a translator to take our vinyl decal quotes and convert them into Spanish designs as well.
Our Etsy store business took over our den, and then our dining room, and then even part of the garage! We desperately needed more and more space. đ
To combat this problem, we ended up leasing a small two-story office space. Then we hired several employees to help keep our Amazon stock consistently replenished.
We put our Etsy store on the backburner. It started to become too time consuming to switch back and forth between fulfilling our smaller, personalized Etsy orders vs rotating our inventory in Amazon.
Hiring employees also allowed me the time to be able to return to school and earn my Master’s Degree. Woohoo! One step closer to becoming ‘Dr Jessica’!
major
Transition (& A Little Break)
After a few short-but-sweet years of promisingly steady business growth, I became pregnant with our 5th child and had a near-fatal heart attack (called a SCAD) at 34 weeks pregnant. đ±
My initial outlook from the doctors was pretty dismal. Doctors gave me around a 42% chance of surviving the first year post SCAD.
My doctorâs biggest piece of life-saving advice? ‘Reduce your stress ASAP.’ đ„Ž
In addition, our sweet baby was in the NICU for several weeks. This was such scary and stressful time for our family.
Our new situation added a LOT of challenges to our family’s daily lives. Not to mention a long list of activities that I was no longer allowed to do because of my heart condition.
My husband found himself running our business himself. He had to manage employees and take care of our 4 kids at home. WHILE helping me heal and driving us to the NICU to visit the baby every day…
Needless to say, it wasn’t long before we realized we needed to change our business- and FAST- if we wanted to keep ourselves afloat.
(See? I told you this story had some bummer stuff. But you can’t have a good story without a good comeback!)
It wasnât long before we found ourselves making the decision to move abroad to a place with universal healthcare and a much slower pace of living in hopes of reducing my stress and simplifying our hectic lifestyle.
(And, not to be morbid, but a major factor in our move was my desire to see the world and have a beautiful of a year with my sweet family. You know… just in case those doctors were right about the prognosis timeline.)
We closed down our office and streamlined as much of our business as possible. We said our goodbyes to friends and family.
Then we headed abroad with a small chunk of savings and no clue what our life was going to look like living overseas.
(PS- You can actually learn more about our move abroad and the process we went through on our LathropsGoneAWOL family travel blog!)
new beginnings
Amazon, Shopify and Etsy (…Again…)
After doing a bit of travel and settling down in Spain, we worked on launching a NEW brand on Amazon.
Since we no longer had the ability (or machinery) to create vinyl decals en masse anymore, we went to work finding vendors, suppliers and shippers to create our own private-label brand of glassware. đ„ł
We also opened a Shopify store and started exploring that new, different style of ecommerce.
It was a really unique experience, since we were responsible for providing our OWN traffic.
Unlike Amazon and Etsy, which drives customers directly to you, we had to learn a LOT about marketing and running ads. đ
By now, selling on Amazon had become super competitive. Amazon had also started having a LOT of problems on their back end.
We were hearing horror story after horror story from other sellers. We even suffered a few mishaps of our own- with listing problems, warehouse inventory mis-labeling, and more!
Seeing that things were starting to degrade for Amazon sellers as the platform became more saturated, we decided to diversify our income. (Just in case.)
This was a GREAT time to get back into the Etsy game! This time with print on demand- so I could work 100% remotely and not need to make any of my products myself.
Print on demand was fairly new at this point. So we weren’t sure how this would work out long term.
hello
etsy seller 2.0
Starting a new Etsy store was a fun challenge for me. I had to refresh myself on how everything worked and update all of my knowledge on things like Etsy SEO, finding trending products, etc.
But it also allowed me to tap back into my creativity, and I LOVED creating new shirt designs!
Since my husband was running our (now fairly streamlined) Amazon/Shopify brand, I was free to focus solely on Etsy.
It took me about seven months to break the six-figure mark with my new POD store on Etsy. Woohoo! đđđ
Things were going good, and our different income streams were all growing and flowing.
But after a while, Larry and I REALLY started to miss working together. So we decided to launch a NEW and different kind of business- helping other entrepreneurs- in addition to our ecommerce ventures. đ„°
Off and on throughout the last decade, we had helped lots of friends and family members learn how to sell on e-commerce and navigate the various business hurdles that you tend to encounter as a new business.
And we’d even gotten referrals from our friends and family to help OTHER people looking to start an online business.
Helping other people find success as entrepreneurs was both fun and addicting.
Maybe it was my inner people pleaser, but I LOVED seeing people build businesses they enjoyed and finding more freedom in becoming their own bosses.
Driven by that strong desire to help others, we decided to take our passion to the next level by officially offering our support to other aspiring businesses!
We weren’t exactly sure what direction to go in. So we tested out a lot of different ideas, but our main goal was helping others grow their businesses faster. We also wanted people to avoid some of the pitfalls that slowed us down over the years.
We LOVED helping other small businesses grow! Even though we weren’t quite sure what to focus on, OWLLytics was a lot of fun to develop and explore.
But my POD store was still growing SO MUCH and had become MORE than a full time job! I was selling my (mostly personalized) t-shirts faster than I could count! đ€© I ended up having to hire someone to help me personalize the designs and process orders, with NO signs of slowing down.
What a great problem to have, right?!
As it turns out, however, it brought a few unexpected challenges that I hadnât anticipatedâŠ.
something
has got to give!
I discovered that there was still a LOT of stress involved with selling t-shirts. (Even though they were print on demand.) There were a high number of customer questions about sizing, colors, personalization, and of course the occasional return or exchange.
So I needed to be available all of the time in order to answer questions and stay on top of my Etsy messages. This was in addition to my actual order creation. Additionally, most of my best-sellers were personalized items, designing was time consuming as well.
And, since my store was growing so quickly, I found myself working a LOT more than expected (even with hired help)!
Meanwhile, all of my hard work was paying off, and I was voted UMUC’s International Entrepreneur of the Year in 2019.
Next, I was featured on RadioImpactUSA’s radio show called ‘Crushing40’ in 2020 to talk about OWLLytics and tell the wild origin story of how it started.
But between growing OWLLytics, running my rapidly-expanding Etsy store, and managing a family of 7 (with a heart condition), I was burning out fast!
As much as I LOVED what I did, the perfectionist in me had to do EVERYTHING with 120% effort- and it was really difficult for me to outsource things because I wanted them done exactly a certain way.
Hiring someone to personalize MY designs was a lot different than outsourcing customer service or my social media platforms- because I wanted to be able to control the quality and tone of voice I had built into my brand.
And so, the immense hours I was working combined with the stress of everything I had jauntily piled onto my plate started to wear me out.
As these things tend to happen, in the chaos of 2020, I eventually suffered another heart attack.
I was doing and worrying TOO much and my body just wasn’t having it anymore. đ
So, with much hesitation and a lot of sadness (not to mention a few tears), I finally agreed to close my POD store and focus on my health.
But because of the world-wide shut-down of factories and the chaos of supply chain issues once things opened back up again, our private-label Amazon brand had also suffered a major collapse of inventory and competitive prices became much more difficult to maintain.
Instead of restocking our Amazon inventory, we decided to take a break from our long love of e-commerce.
Instead, Larry shifted OWLLytics into a very specific niche: helping businesses understand their DATA and make more data-driven decisions for their growth. That double masters he’d earned in the military came to our rescue, hard core!
This was something he could do to help other businesses on his own, while I could focus on healing and being a mom.
And so, during the next 1-2 years, I was able to focus on different things for myself and our family- I studied to get my Spanish drivers license, which was a full time job for about 8 months, so we could be able to go more places outside of the city. I learned some Spanish to make our daily lives easier in our new life abroad.
And I also used my website and graphic design skills to develop the new website and back-end stuff for OWLLytics’ redirection into data science.
But, I was an entrepreneur at heart. đ„°
cheers to a
Whole New Entreprenuerial World!
It wasnât long before I realized how much I enjoyed sharing what Iâd learned about running a successful online business.
The possibilities for creating and streamlining strategies were endless, and I wanted to help others navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship.
My natural curiosity and love for exploring new ideas led to an âahaâ moment.
My husband (ever the practical one) suggested I channel my passion for business strategies and niche research into helping others succeed.
His idea stuck: Why not create a space where I could share tools, tips, and strategies to help fellow entrepreneurs build the businesses of their dreams?
What started as a small project quickly blossomed into something much bigger…
I found immense joy in breaking down the strategies of successfully selling products, simplifying workflows, and providing actionable advice for busy entrepreneurs, from Etsy sellers to online business owners and beyond!
Over the last few years, Iâve been working to build a thriving hub of resources for small business owners looking to streamline their work, save time, and grow their revenue- all without sacrificing their sanity.
Now, my mission is to grow Insights by Jess into an indispensable resource for online entrepreneurs.
From simplifying your workflows to mastering productivity, I aim to empower you with the tools and strategies you need to thrive.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to take your business to the next level, youâll find actionable guidance here to make your journey a little easier (and a lot more fun!).
And if you’re not quite bored reading about me yet, check out my interview with Printify in their Success Stories!
Thank you for being here, for supporting Insights by Jess, and for letting me be a small part of your business journey. I canât wait to help you simplify, streamline, and grow! đ
Ready to take the leap into your amazing future?
And here are a few FREE ways I can help you
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Resource Library
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