Insight
Ocean & Sea, founded in 2013 alongside my wife Amanda, began with a simple concept, be creative! Based on our last name—O’Shaughnessy—we were eager to explore a creative avenue that we had full autonomy over. The starting line began with a creative project we called The Daydreams Project (winning a National Gold AAA), where we did something creative 5 days a week for nearly a year. We gained traction with marketing on social media and developed into a product line. From there we added a variety of stores to our supply chain and sold our products at events. Later, we built a Sailboat Pop-Up Shop and even opened our very own store front and studio space in Kansas City. Now, we have evolved into serving an array of amazing clients with the same careful attention to detail. We’re always dreaming again.
Challenge
Starting a company with $700 is no easy task; the largest hurdle in the beginning was resources. We had to be extremely utilitarian in the early days and that forced us to learn how to extend our limited supplies by approaching those hurdles creatively. In addition, we both were working full time jobs in the beginning years so we had to sacrifice almost all of our free time outside of work.
Solution
Consistency was our ultimate solution. We spent 2-4 hours per day expanding our creative vision and business operations and called it a day when we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer. In addition, we have always adopted a relational first approach in business which made us realize how valuable our network is in generating opportunities.
Outcome
We grew our product line from 4 initial offerings into 175+ unique products including apparel, prints and accessories.
Instead of waiting for a client to exercise our creative muscles we took the initiative through Ocean & Sea.
Successfully funded a Kickstarter, raising $23K to help build a Sailboat Pop-Up Shop to sell our goods.
