The PBC Story | Part One
- Oct 5, 2017
- 6 min read
We wanted to take a quick second to thank anyone who has taken a second to read any of our blogs about this little business of ours that we love so much! We are so thankful to find our passion in life - helping small businesses design a brand they feel connected to - and we feel so lucky we get to do it together.
If you've been following us for a little while, you probably know that Becca and I are sisters. If you didn't know, you might be having the same reaction as a lot of people do when we tell them we're sisters. You two are related? Really? Wait, are you like real sisters? With the same parents? While we don't exactly look like twins, we are in fact real sisters - and beyond that, we are real friends, and now, we get to call ourselves real business partners!
photo by We, The Light Photography
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
We grew up in a small town just outside of Boulder, in Lafayette, Colorado. Our parents are high school sweethearts - our dad fell in love with our mom for her work ethic, uniqueness and carefree attitude and our mom was smitten over our dad's humor, charm and his incredible talent of playing the guitar. Our mom grew up on a farm just outside of the city and spent her days away from friends, raising animals, planting gardens and taking care of her two younger brothers. Our dad is one of six and grew up very close to his siblings - he's always instilled in us that family is the most important thing you'll ever have. While our mom helped her parents with their family farm, our dad and his siblings helped their father (our grandpa) manage two automotive stores in town, Bill's Auto Supply. Unfortunately, our grandpa got sick and when he passed away, our dad and his siblings took over the stores. We have very fond memories as kids playing in the auto shop, mixing paint for fun and playing with all of the inventory. Though our grandpa died just a few months before Becca was born and we never got to meet him, we still feel like we have a huge part of his soul with us - and attribute our entrepreneurial spirit to him.
Becca and I have been inseparable since we were kids - and when I mean inseparable, I mean to the point where if we aren't physically together, we're probably talking on one to three different channels, or maybe all of them at once: the phone, over text, g-chat... you get the point. She's 2 years and 8 months older than I am - which means I am the copy cat sister by default. Our mom always tells the story of us being toddlers in the grocery store and shoppers telling my sister how cute her baby "brother" was - my sister would always respond with, "That's not my brother, she's a girl and she's my sister" (Thanks for sticking up for me, sis!). That's how my sister is though - she would do anything for me, and I for her, and for that, I've always looked up to her, confided in her, and trusted her with my whole life.
We attended the same high school where our parents met and fell in love, and also went to the same college, Colorado State University (#GORAMS). We've known for quite some time that we wanted to have business-related careers and both earned degrees in Marketing from CSU's College of Business. Becca received certificates in finance and real estate later acquiring a Real Estate License, while I minored in Apparel Merchandising with hopes of landing something great in the fashion industry. We've always loved learning and being in school and worked really hard to maintain good grades. In our years of school, we were always the first people in group projects to take on the role of designing posters, PowerPoint presentations, reports, etc. - you name it, if it had the opportunity to be "designed" in any way, we wanted to be the ones who got to take credit.
After graduating college, Becca worked in the commercial real estate industry and I worked in the fashion industry and while we both excelled and thought that's what we had always worked for, there was a piece of us that was missing (we just couldn't figure out what). We always wished we could work together (like we did as kids managing our family's garage sales or like we did for a short amount of time in college - Becca got me a job as her assistant at the real estate company she worked at for a summer, just so we could hang out together!) but we just had pretty different focuses that didn't seem like they'd ever cross paths.
Fast forward a few years - Becca marries the love of her life, they buy a house, I turn down a move for a job in Los Angeles as I meet the love of my life, we move in - and here Becca and I are on the phone talking as usual. Becca goes on to tell me how she was creating her best friend's wedding menus, programs and escort cards and was so excited by the opportunity to design wedding materials again (she designed her own, too!) and I begin telling her how I'm super excited too because one of my close friends recently asked me if I could help her out with her new startup - she needed a logo and a website and was not very tech savvy, but knew I loved creating things on the computer. The best part about these interactions with our friends was the fact that they insisted on paying us for our time designing. Cool, extra cash to do our favorite thing...go shopping!
Fast forward a couple of weeks and another friend asks Becca to do their wedding materials, and my best friend's mom asks me if I can design a logo for her business (I was using Publisher to design logos, FYI - if you're in the design world, you'll get the joke there.) Another close friend asks me if I can help her out with her website (disclaimer: at the time, my only knowledge of coding was from MySpace days when Becca and I would sit for hours until we got the perfect pink background and sparkly images built into our pages) but I gave it a go, and succeeded. Fast forward another couple weeks, another couple of months, with more friends and friends of friends asking us to design things for them. We spent our nights and weekends after our 9-to-5's designing and creating things for our friends because we wanted to, because it allowed us to be creative and because we were doing something we loved - but we didn't realize what we were doing. We were creating a business, our dream business, we just didn't know it yet.
Our epiphany moment: We were walking to get a coffee at Starbucks before we went shopping in Target (our usual Saturday routine), talking about work, our loves, and how life was actually getting really busy for the both of us as we were spending a lot of our free time designing things for friends. We stopped gave each other that, "I'm your sister so I know exactly what you're thinking and what you're about to say" look, and in that moment, we knew. Oh my gosh, WE should be designing things together, for more than just our friends, for anyone, for cash, for profit... as a BUSINESS! Without hesitation, we were both 100% in - our first task, what were we going to call our new business?! We sat down with our coffees and thought, what is something we could never live without (besides each other of course)... "Peanut Butter" - Becca joked. Anyone who knows us knows that our go-to dessert/snack/meal is something with peanut butter in it (thanks for your sweet tooth, Dad!). And that, my friends, is how Peanut Butter Creative started.
Tune in next week to read The PBC Story: Part 2.
XOXO
Happy Dream Chasing,
Jenna
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