My husband and I packed up the boxes and took them to our house. We had previously decided to not open any gifts until after the wedding and we had so. many. boxes. throughout the house between PHNX, wedding gifts, wedding decor, and his stuff the house was full! Thankfully(???) we didn’t even have couches at that point because they were backordered (yay Covid!) so we had the entire living room and dining room to store boxes and we left a small path so we could go room to room.

I could hardly contain my excitement. Here was my entire savings packed up in boxes of hopefully sellable shorts. I took a deep breath and opened the first box. They were the most beautiful shorts I had ever seen. I took a few days to organize the shorts and began packing up orders from my living room, gradually going through my google doc sheet of orders (no POS set up yet) and matching it to my Venmo account (no business account set up yet) to make sure everything matched. I didn’t even have a printer yet so I had to go to my parent’s house to print. It was tedious work, but it was worth every bit. I wrote, and still write, each person a thank you note for their purchase. It’s true that small business owners really do value each and every purchase. I still remember the person who made the first order - Hi, Merritt!

The first round of orders went out and I waited for people to hate them. I was sure this couldn’t be real. I could not have created a product that people actually liked, but I did. I am forever grateful to each person who purchased shorts that first time. You have forever changed my life.