Hello 2022!!
Oh how I love a fresh start! Clean pages in a datebook, New Year's resolutions and taking down the Christmas tree. I love cleaning up the house, re-organizing the storage room and sitting down to map out the infinite possibilities of the next twelve months. Yes, a new year is one of my favorite things. But while I am looking forward, I also want to take a moment to look back on the past year, and the amazing milestones in Abby Maddy!
Oh how I love a fresh start! Clean pages in a datebook, New Year's resolutions and taking down the Christmas tree. I love cleaning up the house, re-organizing the storage room and sitting down to map out the infinite possibilities of the next twelve months. Yes, a new year is one of my favorite things. But while I am looking forward, I also want to take a moment to look back on the past year, and the amazing milestones in Abby Maddy!
It's been an incredible year full of growth, risks and leaps of faith- the biggest of which was opening the Abby Maddy & Company Studio in downtown Kingsport. If you've been around a while on this journey, you know that AMC has been operated in my home since its creation. As a active duty military family, we never knew quite where (or when) the next duty station would come calling. So for the past eleven years, with each new house, came a new challenge to create a space for a growing brand. But with military retirement came lots of new opportunities, and though Covid temporarily set us back, this past July we brought The Studio to life.
The space is ever-changing to accommodate new styles, brands, launches, events and the daily workload. It's the vibrant, cheery, creative venue that I have longed for all these years. In addition to opening the studio, we celebrated the launch of the Southern Charm Collection, re-opening our wholesale program to place AMC into other retail stores, and the addition of the Curated Collection. We also introduced three brand new designs to the Signature Collection and wrapped up the year with one of our best ever holiday seasons.
It's fun to look back and important to acknowledge those day to day moments that lead to success. But I'll let you in on a little secret- some of those days didn't feel like success at all. Some of those days were just plain hard. The three weeks in June, when the air conditioning wasn't working and I was on a scaffold ten hours a day painting- hard. The week leading up to Thanksgiving and Black Friday when my husband and I spent every night at the studio working until ten o'clock-hard. The days when I put hardware on a hundred Keyfobs to ship orders and my fingers bled and I felt guilty for not being home with my kids and mom guilt set in, so, so hard. But each of those days led incrementally to an amazing year.
As we look forward to 2022, and celebrate the wins of 2021, lets remember some days will inevitably be hard. But hard doesn't mean impossible. Each day those little milestones bring us closer to achieving our goals and I can't wait to see what 2022 brings!
