Business & Tech

Home Business Helps Montgomery Family Re-Frame Their Lives

After her husband was laid off in 2009, Carolyn Buchmiller started a business making personalized works of art. Now that business is taking off.

Carolyn Buchmiller’s home office is a model of organization.

It’s set up in one of the bedrooms of her two-story house in Montgomery. In the walk-in closet, she keeps picture frames, of all types and sizes. In a filing system to the left of her desk, she has hundreds of photographs, each one designed to evoke a particular letter of the alphabet.

Tucked into one corner is her mat cutter, so she can trim the colored backgrounds and fit them into the frames. On one wall is a massive television set, which she watches while toiling away. It is here that Carolyn spends much of her time, when she's not caring for her 18-month-old son Andrew.

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It’s a cozy workspace, but she’ll soon be leaving it. The Buchmillers’ business, The Name in Pictures, has become so successful in its first year that she’s moving down into her basement, to have more storage and work space.

That success is something she didn’t expect, but then, everything about The Name in Pictures has been unexpected. 18 months ago, her life was very different. Her husband Patrick had a good job as a marketer for an online company, and she was getting ready to have her first child and be a stay-at-home mom.

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But then, six weeks after Andrew was born, Patrick was laid off.

“It was definitely a scary time,” Carolyn said. But rather than wallow in despair, the Buchmillers charted a different course.

Taking a hobby online

It was Patrick who thought of the idea first. For years, Carolyn had been trying her hand at creating word pictures, using photographs of everyday objects to spell out names in a picture frame. She’d made these creations as gifts for friends and family, but Patrick was the one who suggested they could start a business around them.

“A few weeks before Christmas (2009), he said, ‘I’m going to build a website.’ He had time to learn how to do that. He taught himself,” Carolyn said.

The result was www.thenameinpictures.com, offering Carolyn’s word-picture art for sale. The site launched in the beginning of January last year, and within a day, Carolyn said, the pair had their first order.

“We didn’t expect it that quickly,” she said, laughing. “We didn’t even know how to ship the orders. We didn’t know what kind of boxes to use.”

From there, the orders started flooding in. Carolyn credits Patrick’s skills as a marketer—he knew how to get their site listed on Google and Yahoo searches. But she also credits the originality of her product. The Name in Pictures offers specialty items, like frames with ribbons through them, and ones with signature boards: large empty spaces for wedding guests to sign.

Now the business gets an average of an order a day, Carolyn said, and the Buchmillers charge about $100 for each one. During the holidays, that number goes up considerably: over Christmas, she said, the pair filled about 100 orders, Carolyn assembling the frames upstairs while Patrick packed them for shipping in the basement.

“If next year is as busy as this year, I’m going to have people on reserve to help out,” she laughed.

Getting over the bad times

The unexpected success of The Name in Pictures bridged the financial gap left when Patrick lost his job. It also allowed the couple some breathing room while Patrick looked for just the right employment.

In September, after 11 months without work, he found it. Now Carolyn manages the business and takes care of Andrew during the workday. She’s still surprised at how well My Name in Pictures is doing, and how much easier it has made their lives.

“It didn’t take much for us to start this business,” she said. “I was definitely afraid, but it helps to have someone who supports you and pushes you.”

Now the couple—Patrick is 34, Carolyn 30—is envisioning a time when their home business outgrows their home. Looking back, she’s still amazed that something so good came out of a time of such difficulty.

“I know a lot of people are hurting, and it’s hard to see the other side,” she said of the down economy. “But great things can come out of it.”


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