Christmas day, 2005. Sitting around the Christmas tree with my husband, 3 year old and 11 day old life was crazy and wonderful. My sister and I had been playing around with the idea of starting a business together. We both enjoyed sewing, so maybe a quilt shop would be fun. After thinking about it, we realized that the quilts would be too expensive…no one would actually buy them. However, the business bug was stuck in my head. Under the Christmas tree was an envelope. To Jill From Rob. Inside the envelope was a gift certificate. Rob would register a domain name and build a website for me to sell my crafts. Later that day, the idea for AllyZabba was born. Were we crazy to be doing this now? 2 small children, one of them not even one month old! Whatever. Let’s just jump in and see what happens. Over the next few weeks Rob built the site and I started sewing blankets.
Christmas day, 2015. Sitting around the Christmas tree with my husband, 13 year old and 10 year old life was still crazy and wonderful. This year our family has the chance to live abroad for one year. This is super exciting for all of us. We will live in a new environment, meet people from all over the world, travel, explore and experience life like never before. Knowing that this change was on the horizon we needed to make some plans to be away. One huge obstacle was my business, AllyZabba. I couldn’t run it from across the pond, so really the only option was to find someone to take over the reigns.
Amazingly, finding a new owner wasn’t as difficult as we thought. Our long time friends, David and Laura, said that they were interested in running the business. This was a perfect solution. They are the perfect team to take over where Rob and I left off. We couldn’t be more excited for them to take AllyZabba and make it their own.
Over the last several days we have reminisced about the early years.
Remember when we got our first order from someone we didn’t know!?Remember when I used scrap material to make patchwork burp cloths! Those were cute but a lot of work! Remember when I used to wash every blanket in dreft baby detergent? Gift baskets were a fun experiment.
It has been such a great 10 years. We have made mistakes and we have had great successes. Our customers are pretty awesome. The majority of our success is because of them. They come back again and again and they tell their friends about us. We couldn’t be more grateful for them.
Now it’s time to press ahead to the adventure that awaits across the pond in 2016.