Hi friends!
Welcome to The 270, we are so glad to share this journey with you! My name is Kristie and my partner is my 15 year old daughter Addi. We want to welcome all our new followers and share our story with those that are new since it’s been a while that we have introduced ourselves and tell you a little bit about the future of “The 270”.
Crafting, creating, decorating and shopping has been a passion of mine since as early as I can remember. I think back to my childhood and I remember cutting up paper to make designs, drawing the shape of a shirt and cutting things out of a magazines and gluing to the shirt. From an early age I was creative but to be honest I didn’t realize it and never really considered it as a career. I always wanted to teach and that’s what my focus was for the first 18 years of my adult life. I taught preschool and was a Early Childhood Director. Many of you all are parents or even students from those 18 years and it’s such a blessing to keep up with your families. In 2019 I decided to step back from that and focus my time on my children, they were growing up so fast and I felt like I was missing a lot and needed to be more present. I stayed home all through covid and started getting creative again. I started with farm house decor and signs. I enlisted my husband and he was building benches, quilt ladders and so much more. These items were hard to ship, time consuming and I was not finding joy in what I was doing. A close friend called and asked if I was interested in going back to work and a couple weeks later I started at my current job working the front desk at a busy walk in clinic. This has been a lot of fun and I have learned so much as I had never even considered doing anything in the medical field.
Now to how The 270 became what it is today and where I’m finally finding my joy! I was working full time but in a family friendly environment so I was still able to be present for my children. In March of last year my glaucoma started getting the best of me, I had dealt with the pain and headaches for many years but it was getting worse. I saw a local eye doctor who told me what I had been fearing for many years, I needed my eye removed! This all happened fast and I truly didn’t have time to process it all. That first appointment was on a Monday, Wednesday I was in Nashville at a specialist and Friday I was there again having the surgery. Can’t forget to add in, somewhere in those 5 days I also broke my wrist as I was in a whirlwind to try to prepare for this big change in a small timeframe.
So what does this have to do with start of The 270? After my eye was removed I had to make many many trips to Nashville due to the issues I started to have after surgery. As I said before I enjoy shopping an unfortunately passed that down to my sweet Addi! We made each trip into an adventure of finding new fun places to shop. We visited so many fun boutiques and enjoyed our time together. During one of the trips Addi said “ Mom, what if we started something like this”. Those words are what brought The 270 to life. Our dreams and ideas were big and still are. The trip home that day was so much fun sharing our ideas with each other and debating on a name. I chose “Sweet Tea and Begonias” I wanted a southern feel with all things Kentucky. Addi is much smarter then me and sometimes the way she thinks as a teenager truly blows me away. She told me, that’s cute mom, but we don’t need cute. Addi wanted something that would create a sense of community, something that was easy to remember, something that would allow us to grow and expand our brand and not have a name that would limit what we offered. She knows my love for Kentucky and shopping small so she incorporated that and then came “The 270”.
We had no idea where this was going to take us but we were ready and I was so thankful to have her along for the ride. This was going to allow us valuable time together and allow me to teach and learn with her important things about being an entrepreneur and running a small business.
Like I said earlier I had a lot of complications with my eye and wasn’t able to work full time due to the pain. This allowed me to work when I felt well enough and able to continue at my other job 3 days a week. We started ordering items in the beginning of April and really thought boutique clothing was what we wanted to focus on, offering fun shirts along the way. We do still offer small amounts of boutique clothing and other items but thanks to you all, you have allowed us to grow this into a fun shirt making business.
What does the future look like for the 270? We really don’t know where the Lord will guide us, but we are listening and ready for whatever he has in store! We want to better what we have and grow into more then just a shirt business, we want to create a community. We have decided to create a blog to that will allow us to share more of our creative ideas and just everyday life.
Many of you that know me personally know that I love to cook and decorate. I want to share that with you! I want to share when I find great recipes, or great deals on home decor, fashion and more. I want to share our life adventures good and bad. I don’t want to lose the focus of our page or drown it with other things. I have so much I want to share and someday I want this to become full time. So if you made it this far, we are so glad you are here! We have big ideas and dreams for 2023! Addi has started her own small business adventure as a branch of the 270 and I can’t wait to blog about that adventure!
I want to finish by saying I’m thankful for each of you. It’s amazing how right Addi was about building a sense of community, this is more then a T-shirt business. Many of you I’ve never met in person, but I have grown to love so many of our sweet customers. My inbox is full of wonderful conversations that have started with discussing an order and turned into so much more! Thank you for supporting us, loving on us in the hard times, and being so patient when we make a mistake!
Hold on tight because God has big plans in store for us and we are ready to follow his lead!
💕Kristie and Addi