The Art of Perseverance: Kirstie’s Journey

- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -

Entrepreneurship is the great equalizer. Regardless of your background, opportunity, education, and a myriad of other social factors, if you can find a way to give people something they want, you can create an amazing life for yourself and for others.

This is exactly the story of Kirstie, founder of AmourPrints, an art and decor powerhouse that creates custom print canvases. Many customers of AmourPrints are couples who commemorate their love with their names on a canvas, but AmourPrints designs many different kinds of custom canvases as well. Their offerings include lyrics for songs, canvas photo printing, wedding song lyrics on canvas, and you can even print your song. AmourPrints specializes in wedding anniversary gift ideas, anniversary gifts for him, anniversary gifts for her, and so on.

Kirstie’s creative streak that would eventually germinate into a multimillion dollar canvas printing company started as a teenager, when she experimented with twisting balloons into creative shapes. Her entrepreneurial drive kicked in and she decided to start performing her balloon art at restaurants. This is where she began to sense her entrepreneurial spirit: she saw that art had the power to give people something meaningful in life, and decided to take things a step further.

With no business education and very limited finances, she decided to start AmourPrints in 2012. By 2013, she was able to begin her very first Etsy shop. “I was so excited to get my first sale! I loved that experience when I was first starting out. I dropped out of college to do this full time and so did my fiance, because it became our dream to run our own successful business.”

Like any entrepreneurial success story, this journey was not without its challenges. Kirstie and her husband’s Etsy store was unexpectedly taken down, causing them to have to learn a plethora of skills very quickly in order to survive. Etsy had provided a lot of the infrastructure required for selling, and without this infrastructure, Kirstie and her husband had to quickly adapt.

In addition, they faced strong opposition from people close to them regarding their decision to take significant risks financially as well as their decision to leave school to start their business.

Defending their decision as they were a fledgling, growing business was nothing if not an emotional roller coaster, fraught with uncertainty. This speaks to a double standard we tend to have in our entrepreneur-loving culture: we often criticize and write off people who take necessary risks to start businesses as foolish, yet we glamorize those who succeed in their businesses, forgetting that the only reason they’ve succeeded is because they took those very risks.

In 2019, amid a growth period, AmourPrints faced a difficult impasse in which they were hemorrhaging cash, and they had to choose whether to persevere or scrap the company. “We were losing thousands of dollars each month, but something was telling me not to give up, to instead push through. This later turned out to be one of our wisest decisions regarding our business,” Kirstie explains.

As if AmourPrints hadn’t experienced enough tribulation, 2020 brought the historic COVID pandemic which likewise posed a mortal threat to the company. “I upgraded to Shopify Plus and took a risk and invested all of our money [to stay alive]. Last year, in 2020, we somehow miraculously made $3.6 million, and this year we are on track to double our earnings,” Kirstie explains. “I have worked so hard, and I give God the credit for helping me through this. Our families are proud of us and now understand why we didn’t give up.”

As Christians, Kirstie and her husband have made it a point of emphasis to donate a significant portion of their earnings back to those in need as they’ve persevered and experienced very rare growth. “We feel led to donate a percentage of our sales to help those in need. With each sale, we donate to World Vision to help fight homelessness all over the world.” This benevolent, life-giving faith as Christians on the rosy side of the entrepreneurial journey, after their success, is the exact faith that helped her and her husband persevere through incredible stress and difficulty during the darker times leading up to their success.

Entrepreneurship is the great equalizer. It can take someone who starts as a struggling teenager trying to socialize with audiences at a restaurant while making balloon art to building a multimillion-dollar art company that survives the worst pandemic in a century. Whether it’s the grace of God, a gritty, persevering attitude, or both, it’s an incredible thing to watch, and Kirstie Edwards is exactly the kind of person for whom you’d love to watch it happen.

Home of Science
Follow me

- Advertisement -

Discover

Sponsor

Latest

Twitter can’t protect you from trolls any more, insiders sayon March 5, 2023 at 10:31 pm

Current and former employees of the company say there are serious ramifications from mass lay-offs.Image source, Tom TraiefBy Marianna SpringBBC Disinformation and social media...

The Papers: ‘Meltdown Monday’ and ‘Race for No10 gets personal’on July 17, 2022 at 10:49 pm

This week's forecast of extremely hot weather features on a number of today's newspaper front pages.This week's forecast of extremely hot weather features on...

Jewish students say NUS not fighting antisemitismon December 9, 2022 at 12:03 am

The Union of Jewish Students says it has lost confidence in the National Union of Students.By Hazel ShearingEducation correspondentAmy Cregor, a drama student at...

Jeremy Hunt: We will reverse almost all mini-budget tax cutson October 17, 2022 at 10:44 am

Support for household and business energy bills beyond April will also be reviewed, chancellor announces.The government will reverse almost all the tax cuts it...

The Papers: ‘Workers face strike ban’ and ‘prince of sales’on January 11, 2023 at 2:59 am

Wednesday's papers say millions of workers face a strike ban and Prince Harry's memoir breaks a record.Wednesday's papers say millions of workers face a...
Home of Science
Follow me