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Mother-daughter businesses growing in Lowcountry
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
It’s a familiar practice: fathers and sons running and growing businesses together. What’s not as familiar is a mother and daughter duo operating a business. But that is changing.
“Charleston County has more woman-owned businesses than any other county in the state. Ten percent of all (statewide) woman-owned businesses are in this one county,” said Jennet Robinson Alterman, director of the Charleston’s Center for Women.
The nonprofit development center in West Ashley offers programs, services and events to help women succeed both in business and in their personal lives. One challenge for women opening businesses is that they still have more difficulty than men in securing financing, Alterman said.
“What I hear from the hundreds of business owners that we have interacted with is that financing for both startup and for growth is still very difficult for women to attain,” Alterman said. “I think a lot of it is that the networks are not in place. Frequently, men who have been in business have had ongoing relationships with bankers and the risk factor is lower.”
Finances aside, the dynamics of operating a company day-to-day with one’s closest relative can be different depending on the personalities of the mother-daughter pair.
Baking biscuits
Callie White and Carrie Bailey-Morey
Callie White catered small events in the Charleston area for 15 years, mostly through word-of-mouth, before her daughter suggested she should start packaging and distributing her signature item, country ham biscuits.
“Ham and cheese biscuits are kind of a staple in the South,” said White’s daughter, Carrie Bailey-Morey. “She started mincing her ham, and putting chopped ham in the biscuit with a Dijon mustard butter. People would say, ‘where can we buy these? Can you make 200 and let me put them in the freezer?’”
After her first child was born, Bailey-Morey had time on her hands at home and decided to try to help her mother figure out the biscuit-packaging quandary. They discovered a German vacuum sealing machine, and found that the biscuits would freeze well. In November 2005, they began renting space at J. Bistro’s catering in Mount Pleasant, baking biscuits with the same crew that had helped White with her catering events.
In the beginning, Bailey-Morey stored batches of biscuits in four freezers she kept in her laundry room. By October of 2006, the biscuit business had moved into space on Meeting Street.
“We had been baking about 3,500 biscuits and now we can bake anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 a day,” Bailey-Morey said. “Thank goodness we were lucky enough to have some private investors in our family, and it really wasn’t that much money. We were making enough money to pay our bills, but the startup costs were needed to get this place outfitted and to hire a great public relations firm to raise awareness of the biscuit company.”
Awareness has become phenomenal. Callie’s Charleston Biscuits are featured in Modern Bride magazine’s June-July issue and the company was chosen as one of the magazine’s Top 25 Trendsetters of the Year.
The biscuits also are featured in the July issue of Saveur magazine, and were featured in the April issue of House & Garden magazine. The Food Network spent a day filming at Callie’s Biscuit Bakery and will air the show in the fall. Among retailers carrying the brand is the Dean and Deluca store in New York City, and Internet sales of the biscuits on the company’s Web site, www.calliesbiscuits.com, have increased to nearly 75% of sales in the wake of recent publicity.
Bailey-Morey laughed when asked to describe the mother-daughter business relationship.
“We stay away from each other as much as possible,” she said. “We have similar personalities, which is not necessarily a good thing. We drive each other crazy, so she bakes and I run the business. We both get to do what we love, and we stay out of each other’s hair.”
Home and garden duo
Darcy Whalen and Ashleigh Kresslein
Darcy Whalen had a successful career in sales, but had a longtime dream to open a retail store. A visit to Charleston introduced her to King Street, where she felt she could make her dream come true.
Whalen’s daughter, Ashleigh Kresslein, was not so sure. Kresslein thought her mother needed help with the venture.
“One thing led to another,” Whalen said. “She sold her house, now she’s here, and the rest of it is history.”
Whalen and Kresslein opened Simply Divine 16 months ago at 255 King Street. The home and garden retail business was financed with loans against Whalen’s bank CDs and other investments.
“As a woman and a newcomer to Charleston, going to a small community bank was helpful,” Whalen said. “My bank actually gave me very good advice on what to do and how to do it. I think that made a difference.”
Whalen said she and her daughter have gotten to know each other a lot better through the business.
“Because we are so much alike, we do know each other’s strength and weaknesses,” Whalen said. “That actually has helped us when it comes to decisions that we had to make, buying decisions or merchandising decisions.”
The biggest challenge of being in business with her mother is separating work from family, Kresslein said.
“You bring work home with you, that’s hard to separate, and I think that’s where our challenge is,” Kresslein said. “We constantly talk about work.”
Not your brother’s takeout
Miriam Green and April Mazyck
April Mazyck grew up in a family known for good cooking. Her uncle, Joseph Colleton, owns The Buckshot’s restaurant in McClellanville. He was also running a steady take-out business there, Joe’s Catering.
Mazyck and her mother, Miriam, Green started to have their own ideas of starting a business when Mazyck decided to study culinary arts at Johnson and Wales University, the Charlotte, N.C., school formerly located in Charleston.
In Green’s words, her daughter had plans for doing “something fancier” with Joe’s Catering.
Green had no culinary training except for what she had learned from her grandmother.
The two have been running Joe’s Catering now for seven years. Among their clients are Bishop England High School, for which they catered an athletic department event, and the annual Moja Festival, which they have catered for six years. The mother-daughter team also takes on the annual Longshoreman’s Association picnic, an affair with 3,500 guests.
“Catering is not easy, it’s a job you have to love,” Green said. “The challenges are up there because you have a lot of caterers out there, so you really have to sell yourself and your product.”
What Green lacks in culinary training she makes up for with her grandmother’s recipes, even if Mazyck sometimes wants to do things “her way,” she said.
“Young people have their own ideas and she always corrects me,” Green said. “Because of her experience with Johnson and Wales, she does it by the books. She has me watching The Food Network and Emeril and all that.”
Green is sales-oriented, while Mazyck prefers the hands-on part of the business, Mazyck said.
“It’s challenging,” she said, “but you have to work out your kinks, find out where the problems lie and then fix them.”
Knitting therapy
Gay Murrill and Mollie Tracy
Gay Murrill and her daughter, Mollie Tracy, both had planned careers in the health field. Murrill, who spent several years working in retail and had moved to Charleston to open the Barnes & Noble bookstore in West Ashley, later completed nursing school but wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue that career. Tracy, who majored in art therapy at Eastern
Virginia Medical School, also had a minor in set design and theater.
Neither mother nor daughter ever thought the two would be running a yarn shop in Charleston.
“I loved to knit when I was younger,” Murrill said. “I taught Mollie to knit a thousand years ago and she wrote her master’s thesis on the benefits of knitting. We both like the psychological part of knitting. It’s great for R & R, it’s great for fine motor skills and as we get older, we use those less and less.”
Just prior to her graduation, Tracy visited her mother in Charleston and noticed there were not nearly the number of yarn shops here as there are in Virginia. That planted an idea in Murrill, who had a location picked and plans for a shop by the time Tracy graduated.
The shop, Knit, has been in business for three years. Tracy said the business move was random, without much of a business plan, but just seemed to work. The store, at 87 Wentworth St., offers not only a variety of yarns and knitting supplies but also holds knitting classes and does business on the Web at www.knitk.com.
Murrill is purchasing the store property and said a mortgage payment may be difficult, but it is an investment.
“I think what has killed a lot of independent businesses is paying the rent,” Murrill said. “A mortgage is expensive, but at least you’re getting something.”
As business partners, mother and daughter each bring different skill sets to their venture.
“She’s very artistic, very creative, and I’m a math-science major, so different parts of our brain work and sometimes that’s hard,” Murrill said. “In fact, I go to her sometimes for advice.”
Tracy said she and her mother can read each other well and know when it’s time to step back.
“I think the drawback of working together is the same as the advantage, in knowing each other so well,” Tracy said
“At the same time, she sees things so differently from me because she comes from that retail background and I come from that art background. I think we balance each other out. We haven’t killed each other yet, and it’s been three years. It’s been a lot of fun.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
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