Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/96377
in focus { s m a l l b u s i n e s s } By S haron Ve rbete n Feathering the 'Nest' Style, ambience are keys to Sheboygan home store's success Childhood entrepreneur Butler Channel got the entrepreneurial bug really early. As a child in Iowa, she would ride her bike one and a half miles to town to buy gumballs and candy and then sell them to neighborhood kids (after a small markup, of course!). And when she wanted 40 | Insight • D e c e m b e r 2 012 Interior designer and store owner Pamela Butler Channel aims to make her Sheboygan store Nest a destination for seekers of fine home wares and gifts. to have a lemonade stand, her mother urged her to buy the supplies herself. Still, these ventures were tough with very little traffic in her rural town. "I've always had tenacity, and I have a lot of entrepreneurs in my family," she admits. So starting Nest was just another challenge. More than 10 years ago, Butler Channel – a married mother of two – was the family breadwinner, working as a copywriter at the nearby Kohler Company. She had been working nights and weekends doing interior design, but after Sept. 11, 2001, she decided to follow her dream and open Nest. "You see people react to something tragic in different ways," she says. For Butler Channel, there wouldn't be a more opportune time to open the shop. "I'd always had this in the back of my head," she says. But she soon faced roadblocks. She says being female and seeking a small loan for a niche business was difficult. "I had interviews with three banks, and only one (representative) showed up," she recalls. After finally securing a Small Business Administration loan, writing her own business plan and using $10,000 of her own savings, Butler Channel opened Nest in 2002. "It was a happy place for me," she says, but realized it needed to be more than that. "It was make money Sharon Verbeten T he very word "nest" elicits feelings of coziness, warmth and home, and that's the kind of atmosphere Pamela Butler Channel envisioned when she opened her Sheboygan shop home interiors/ design store Nest 10 years ago. And it must be working. One customer even asked if she could just stop by and sit and read in the comfy shop. Having an inviting ambience, inspiring and eclectic offerings and personal service – along with a design philosophy best described as "eclecticing," (eclectic collecting) – has allowed Butler Channel to live out her design fantasies while building Nest into a successful business. In addition to interior design services, the shop in the city's downtown features an ever-changing, and carefully selected, mélange of quality bedding, tableware, furniture, giftware and children's items. "A lot of a store like this is sharing with your customers what makes it special," says Butler Channel. "The most fun is seeing someone get as excited about it as you are." or I would go back to work," she adds. "I was not going to give up." That determination helped Nest be profitable its first year – that and a carefully curated inventory. "We do a w w w. i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m