I'm Vanessa Antonelli. I'm a mom of two and I'm a nursery and kids' space designer.
After becoming a mother, I turned my passion for design into successful
business that helps clients of all backgrounds raise their kids in style.
I grew up in a household where my father was self-employed. Seeing him be able to
be in control of his own destiny, really helped to shape who I wanted to be when I
entered the workforce, because I knew that one day I wanted to own my own business.
I didn't know what that business was going to be.
He always said like, "you have to have money to make money."
So here I was, like, stockpiling away any money I was making.
I was in college.
It was 2002 and I was interning for a celebrity booking firm
and I realized at that point there was some connection to celebrities
and getting things to sell.
And I said to my boyfriend at the time, "those boots are
going to be the next hot thing
and I want to buy all the Uggs in the world."
And, I mean, I paid like $90 for the shoes.
I was putting some of these boots on eBay.
Every single pair was flying out the door, 700, 800, $900,
so I saved a lot of money.
Like I was able to do this,
saved a lot of money,
and that is really the beginning of how my career started.
I decided to combine trend forecasting with the money that I had saved to
create a business, which blossomed into this amazing as seen on celebrity fashion
company. We had such a core customer base,
so I realized that I could expand to include other types of businesses.
The next website was going to be a baby and children's. There was this
sort of shift in what people were spending their disposable income on,
and I felt comfortable that I could start this business knowing that.
I'm a believer that the smartest entrepreneurs know enough to
know when they don't know.
I spent about a year researching. I'm opening accounts with all of these
different vendors and I'm hearing, "we only do brick and mortar plus online."
So 2010, I opened a brick and mortar location
and
simultaneously e-commerce website.
Then, a few months went by, and there would be a line outside when I got
there on Saturday mornings, because someone's told them that, "there's a
girl in there that tells you good advice on how to do your nursery."
And my husband's like, "do you not realize you're running another business?
You're a designer.
You need to start charging for the service."
I just did not grasp it at all
and I didn't go to school for it.
I sort of needed my husband to be able to understand what was
happening and move forward with it.
There's a difference between going into a job and it being a real career.
It takes a lot of hands-on learning
and I learned from those sites early on to be competent enough to then
take that and apply that to other people who now are my clients.
My son was born in August of 2011.
I always felt that I definitely wanted to be a mom, but that it
wasn't going to be all of who I was.
I found very early on that becoming a mom was a balancing act for me.
There are nights where I'll work till two o'clock in the morning, and there
are weeks that I just take off and do what I need to do with my family.
My son would actually come to work with me and he would have run around the
store and he would, I'm not kidding,
sell things to people.
In 2014, Kevin and Danielle Jonas came to meet with me to do a playroom
for their newborn daughter and they needed help with their baby registry.
People Magazine did a great spread on it,
and from that point on, it was an explosion of work and not just in
New Jersey, but actually worldwide.
And it sort of snowballed from there.
I closed the stores and focused only on designing children's spaces. From then,
I've now taken on construction projects for clients and full house renovations.
I think that having your own business really made me think about always
having that safety net, because you never know what the next year is
going to bring. For me, knowing early on that, the more I saved, the more
options I would have was huge to me.
That's led to my success.
I had savings,
so I was able to build the business the way that I wanted to.
When we went from one to two kids, I mean like that is chaos.
Both of them absolutely love helping their mom design.
I love the fact that by being successful in the business that I have created, I
can make my kids happy and I can give them this amazing memorable childhood.
Looking at my own kids today,
they're not really well-prepared for what it means to grow up,
start a business like even basic mortgages and balancing a checkbook.
They just don't learn those things.
So it's really important for us to give them that foundation along the way.
My son is only nine.
He said to us,
"Would I be able to get a golf cart and start a business?" I love the
fact that he was just thinking about a need that could be met. At that moment
he said that to us, as silly as it sounds,
we felt like we had done something right.
My goal would be to get us to the point that we were able to have freedom and
really, truly enjoy and live our life that we've worked so hard to live.
I love the fact that I've shown that I can go through so many different aspects
of what I do. My children who make the decision of what they want to do with
the rest of their lives, without the fear that they don't know how to do it.