How these Birmingham moms made a million-greenback company

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When on a time, not so lengthy ago, two greatest mates turned associates in lifestyle and in organization. This entrepreneurial duo reinvented an old plan, paint-by-figures – and they did it just in time for the Covid pandemic. Their Pink Picasso Kits gave people one thing pleasurable and creative to do with their time at house. And the organization manufactured millions of bucks.

However their story has things of a fairytale, it’s authentic daily life for Ashley and Brittany Silfies. Working with their creativeness and connections, together with a tiny luck, the Birmingham couple have realized what they set out to do right after they started their lives above together. And now they have to pinch on their own to believe that it’s real.

“It feels like we’ve lived 10 decades of everyday living in three yrs,” says Brittany.

Ahead of that, Brittany, a former gymnastics coach, and Ashley, a professional photographer, had been just about every married to their husbands. Brittany experienced just one daughter, Harper, now seven and Ashley had two children, Logan, now 19, and Mia, now 16. The two ladies became very best friends, with their life “intertwined,” says Ashley. They would go in and out of each individual other’s homes and start meal for every other, “as mates do.”

Inevitably, as Brittany explained on the display “Shark Tank” when their episode aired in November of 2021, “Our thoughts just developed, and we blew up our lives.”

Shortly they uncovered them selves dwelling jointly with their small children in a three-bedroom condominium and staring at a blank wall, wondering what they could do with their capabilities.

Just one point they realized for confident was that they could not fail. “Our youngsters had been seeking at us,” Ashley suggests. “We had to make it work for a whole lot of explanations. There was a lot of commitment there.”

“Our young ones had been utilized to the American center-course everyday living,” Brittany reported on the show. “When you strike rock bottom, you get scrappy, and you get courageous.”

That’s when they experienced an notion: using Ashley’s wonderful photographs of floral preparations and turning them into high-high-quality paint-by-quantities kits. Their enterprise, Pink Picasso Kits, would blend Ashley’s photography expertise and her knowledge of production received from owning a children’s outfits company she offered in 2015.

Just about every kit comes in a giftable tube and consists of a 16-by-20 canvas, wood paintbrushes and ample paint to total the style. Nevertheless it can acquire up to 15 hrs to complete every painting, it does not have to be concluded in a single sitting down – the canvas dries quickly and can be rolled up and saved, all over again and all over again. And when you’re accomplished, you’ve created a masterpiece appropriate for framing.

They weren’t the initially to supply paint-by-numbers kits, but they believe they’re the most effective. “I say we have no opposition mainly because our kits are improved than everyone else’s,” claims Ashley. “Our intention was to corner the marketplace on what we do, and do it truly nicely.”

More than the next nine months or so, they labored to get the new company set up to go to marketplace in Atlanta in January of 2019. At that time, they experienced invested just $1,500 in the fledgling venture. “We had a good offer of achievements on the to start with working day,” says Ashley. The line to their booth was five persons deep, she suggests.

By March, Brittany had stop her career and began doing the job on the functions facet, enabling Ashley to cope with gross sales and layout. “She’s a more precision-type character, when compared to my creative craziness,” Ashley states.

Just before they knew it, Oprah experienced named Pink Picasso Kits to her influential list of Beloved Items for 2019. (And she did it once more in 2020 with the duo’s Modern day Monet kit, featuring famous scenes from around the world.)

The “sharks” – prospective traders in entrepreneurial organizations – on “Shark Tank” had been amazed with their thought, but even a lot more amazed with the sum of cash Pink Picasso Kits had already manufactured. According to the clearly show, in 2019, they’d bought $1.3 million in 2020, $3.5 million and they were on keep track of to top rated $5 million in gross profits by the end of 2021. (Ashley will not say how considerably they ended up generating that 12 months, but she acknowledges that it was “great.” Now the business is predicted to expand an additional 25 % by the end of 2022, she claims.)

While they obtained an give from Lori Greiner and Daniel Lubetsky, who required to devote $400,000 for a 15 per cent stake in the business enterprise, Ashley states they did not shut on the offer. “We’re grateful for the extraordinary bump in product sales, and we experience good about the encounter,” she says. “Being on Tv was a bucket-checklist detail for certain, a fantastic affirmation of what we had been executing.”

Given that the show aired, Ashley and Brittany have introduced Don Your Sole, a line of one of a kind shoelaces and non permanent shoe tattoos that can be utilized to the leather-based soles or uppers of white tennis shoes and removed with nail polish. Don Your Sole was highlighted not too long ago between the “Steals and Deals” on “Good Early morning The us.” The organization is also introducing a 3rd line of paint-by-quantities kits, Violet Van Gogh.

When they started off Pink Picasso Kits, Brittany and Ashley preferred flexibility and fiscal flexibility, but the company has accomplished considerably extra. “It served us well in acquiring our new household off the ground,” suggests Ashley. “It also gave a great deal of people today a hobby, and it gave stores a way to promote anything. We despatched a crazy total to outlets.”

Their items are readily available at extra than 2,000 boutiques as nicely as on line by means of their website and at Amazon.

Brittany 1st moved to Birmingham to show up at UAB Ashley, who’s from Memphis, went to Auburn College right before settling in Birmingham. Many thanks to their economic good results, the pair has been capable to obtain and renovate their household desire residence there. In their spare time, they trip horses at Longview Farms, vacation and hold out jointly as a loved ones, claims Ashley.

They very own rental home in Atlanta, and have toyed with the plan of transferring there, but Ashley suggests they’re not heading wherever.

“This is residence,” she states.