The Magnolia Story(20)

The name Magnolia just fit my business and the feeling I wanted to create. We loved it. But I really struggled with how to put the name on that sign. I figured I would have to hand-paint the thing since I didn’t have a budget to have anything professionally made, and I just couldn’t come up with anything that worked. I kept drawing things out, trying to write the word Magnolia in different ways, using the flower itself in a logo of sorts, and it just never felt right to me.

Then one day Chip showed up with the back of his pickup truck just loaded with old metal letters he’d found at a flea market—big, oddly shaped letters taken from various old signs. They were mismatched and rusty and dented—and I loved them. We tacked them up on the front of the shop, spelling out the name that would come to mean so much: Magnolia. The letters were uneven and looked a little handmade and ragged, but it seemed to work. I loved this sign because Chip designed it and made it with his own two hands. It came together in such an imperfectly perfect way, and I hoped people would get it.

To this day that sign is one of my proudest accomplishments. I’m no Joanna Gaines, but I certainly see things differently and love design in my own unique way. That first sign really reflected that for me. I would glow when I would hear a customer come in the shop and say, “I saw the sign and just had to stop in.”

Finally, in October of 2005, the shop was ready to go. In a rush, I hand-painted a dinky little “Open” sign, but I ran out of space for the n, so it dropped down at the end. It was just bad. I didn’t have an advertising budget. I hadn’t done any marketing at all. We’d told plenty of people we knew, of course, and our parents had spread the word, but I was basically hoping that people would see my store when they were driving by and drop in. And yet I put out a sign on my opening day that looked like a four-year-old had drawn it. It was pathetic.

Inside, the shop was pretty much everything I wanted it to be. In addition to the home décor items, I had a section full of fresh flowers for sale. They smelled so good and looked perfect. When I was in New York, I had lived next to a little flower shop, and I’d loved watching people walk out with fresh flowers wrapped in kraft paper. I wanted to create that same feel in Waco, Texas that I had experienced in New York City.

So I had the flowers all ready to go. I had the candles burning. I had Frank Sinatra music playing. And at 9:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors opened, I started to freak out.

She was hyperventilating. No joke. I thought I might have to take her to the emergency room or something, she was so nervous.

I just started panicking. “No one’s going to come. Why is no one here?”

Chip and I had done the math. I needed to make at least two hundred dollars a day in order to pay the mortgage and insurance and electricity. That was two hundred dollars every day we were open just to stay afloat, without any profits. I’d been working so hard getting everything ready that I hadn’t stopped to think about what might happen if the store didn’t make that much money. I was close to a complete nervous breakdown, thinking, What if this doesn’t work?

Then, just after ten o’clock, a Hummer pulled into the parking lot, followed by a Mercedes, followed by a Suburban and then a BMW. All these rich women showed up out of nowhere.

They were doctors’ and lawyers’ wives, stay-at-home moms and grandmothers who loved to shop and who did their best to make their homes feel nice. It turned out they’d all been watching my little shop come together during the renovations. They’d been eagerly anticipating my opening day for weeks, and it seemed that my idea of bringing a New York-style boutique experience to a home décor store wasn’t far-fetched at all. There were a lot of people in town who were excited for it.

My first day open we made $2,800.

By the way, my dad decided to sell his Firestone shop shortly after this. I went over and helped him clean out the attic one day, and guess what I found up there? The wicker sleigh that I’d fixed up nice with the garland and Christmas lights and put up for sale in his lobby was still there, tucked in a corner. I just shook my head. He bought it himself to give me a little boost of confidence as I got ready to open my store.

What can I say? It worked. And so did the shop.

Sometimes when something is meant to be, it’s meant to be. It had nothing to do with how I advertised, and it certainly didn’t have anything to do with my being some kind of an amazing designer or having a reputation, because I wasn’t any kind of a designer at all, and no one knew who I was. I just knew what I liked, and I trusted that other people might like it too. And I was where I was supposed to be. I’d listened to my own intuition and let God guide me toward the plans he’d had for me all along.

I mean, is there anyone who could possibly imagine that the way to get to your life’s calling would be to marry a guy who showed up an hour and a half late to your first date and then to let that man talk you into opening your own small business in the first year of marriage? But guess what? It all seemed to be working out in that perfectly messy way life works when you trust in God and his plans for your life rather than focusing on your own.

At that point, I wasn’t anywhere near used to the dynamics of it all. Chip’s impulsive buying of properties, the way I’d hate them at first and then come to love them, only to have to move out again, the unexpected twists and turns and the hardships we’d have to overcome to get ourselves back on course—all of that was still new to me. And as we repeated them over the next few years, moving from flip house to flip house and starting over again and again, there would be a whole lot of tears.