Guest Mary O'Neil, owner of Hot Potatoes Rubber Stamps, has frequented
The Carol Duvall Show for several seasons. O'Neil joins host Carol Duvall in studio to tell how earning the name "Potato Princess" started with a stain on her shirt.
"I got a stain on the front of a shirt, and it was in a very obvious spot," she says, "I remembered carving potatoes when I was a Girl Scout and so I tried to carve a potato to stamp over the stain." The design reminded O'Neil of a fish, so with a few embellishments, she stamped the front and back of the shirt and wore it to her office the next day. Working at a graphic arts company, O'Neil's co-workers were enthused with her shirt, and soon they began hanging the shirts in the windows of the office building. "So many people would come in and ask about the shirts and interrupt the day and order the shirts," she says, "It was pretty obvious that that's what I needed to be doing."
O'Neil soon began selling her shirts full-time. She lived at the beach and found it to be a great market. Later, she began selling the T-shirts at high-end craft fairs. "I could command my price, and I did not sell them cheaply," O'Neil sold her T-shirts for anywhere from $24 to $48. Surprisingly, the higher the price she set, the more she sold.
After discovering the rubber stamp industry, O'Neil realized that she could carve her own rubber stamps to take the place of the potatoes she was using. Still hand-carving, stamping and selling shirts, O'Neil found some struggle with her attempts to jump-start her business in the most affective way possible. "My life (was) not glamorous," she remembers.
Seeking stamps made for fabric, a stamp manufacturer approached O'Neil, offering to manufacture her stamps. It was a difficult decision for her because she was apprehensive about giving away her secrets. She also had to initially pay a great deal of money to start the manufacturing process. Torn between maintaining her current one-woman business and seeking other ways to grow, O'Neil decided to take the chance of letting the manufacturing company process her stamps. "But I will tell you there were many tears, and you know, I break out in rashes easily, so I broke out in a lot of rashes," she says. However, within a month, it was obvious to O'Neil that her new venture was going to work.
O'Neil then stopped selling T-shirts to focus primarily on selling stamps. After naming the company "Hot Potatoes," O'Neil's husband came up with the idea of packaging the stamps in small potato bags. Although it was a hurdle to find such a bag that would be appropriate for the stamps, O'Neil says the package was attractive and necessary.
Marketing the stamps also quickly became a successful venture for O'Neil. "I am very good at self-promotion, shameful actually," she says. Her full-page ad in a trade magazine was considered unusually heavy promotion for a rubber stamp company. Some of the promotion, however, was a result of luck. Three months after the launch of the manufacturing, someone sent a package of rubber stamps to show host Carol Duvall, which helped O'Neil tremendously. But among all of the factors in her success, she considers her southern dialect to be a one of the biggest contributions. "I'll tell you what, I think a southern accent has helped me in a tremendous way because people hear me and they want to hear what I say whether they are really interested or not."
In seeking stores to sell her stamps, O'Neil concentrated on the smaller stores instead of the large chain craft stores. "If a big store bought from me and something went wrong, it would ruin me financially," she says, "a little store, I can handle the loss."
With 10 years of success behind her, O'Neil's advice to those wishing to start their own craft companies is to focus attention on what they like to do most. "The one piece of advice I have is to stick with what you truly love," she says, "and the jobs that you don't like, for me it would be accounting, hire them out from the get-go. Let go of that and have somebody keep your numbers. That will absolutely keep you in the right place."
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