Inspiring Conversations with Heather Stansbury of Hazel Lane

Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Stansbury. 

Hi Heather, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
As the story goes, Renee Sembera started Hazel Lane in 2016 as something fun and different in addition to her career as a Dental Hygienist. In 2019 things began picking up and I began shooting some of the inventory and assisting with the social media in addition to my career in the Disaster Management and Consulting business. Let’s not forget to mention, we are next-door neighbors and family. A working trial at the end of 2019 was necessary to make sure this is something we wanted to do as partners. All went according to plan and Renee and I officially became partners in 2020 and things began to grow quickly. Then in 2020, a global pandemic hit, and we were faced with several different obstacles. Would our small business survive? Will our customers’ shop? What will happen? The short answer to all of this is yes, yes and we will figure out the needs our customer. What we found is that our business grew exponentially, but what we were buying was different. We let them guide us and we listened along the way. Here we are two years later, and things are wonderful. We’ve since moved all the inventory out of our homes and into an office space in our hometown of Covington, LA. What we intended on being just an “office space” has slowly turned into an office space that is open during the day for ladies to shop when Renee is there packaging and handling the day-to-day operations. I’m still handling the backend operations and business side of things behind the scenes. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Overall, things have run smoothly over the course of time. We always say our partnership has worked well because we do our best not to take anything personally. There are no hard feelings if we don’t agree on a particular issue. We make our best-educated business decision and move on. 

In addition to that, like every other business, the 2020 global pandemic was something we never expected to face, but we were up for it. We listened to our customers and let them tell us what they wanted. 

As you know, we’re big fans of Hazel Lane. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Hazel Lane is a women’s online clothing boutique that sells the latest in affordable fashion. Here at Hazel Lane, we want you to feel like the best version of yourself when you put on our pieces. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dinner outfit, a new blazer for the office, or the cutest carline sneakers, we want you feeling your VERY BEST! I think what sets us apart is that personal touch that we offer to each and every customer. You aren’t getting a random person answering our emails, DMs, or working to find you that special outfit. It’s Renee or I each time. We want each customer walking away happy with a smile. We pride ourselves on offering the highest level of customer service. Lastly, what we have continued to offer since the beginning is FREE SHIPPING throughout the United States. That’s a big deal for me when I shop personally and this is something we’ve continued to offer to our customers. 

Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think the biggest risk overall is Renee deciding to take me on as her partner. This could’ve gone wrong on so many levels and it hasn’t (thank God!). We had much more to lose than the average business partners. We are family and live next door to each other. If things went south, it could’ve been bad. 

On the other hand, in business, risks must be taken in order to grow. Things are scary, but at the end of the day how else would you hit your goals without taking risks. The risk we took in 2021 is renting an office space (which was much larger that the free space we had in our homes). We had no idea if we would be able to make the rent or not. We wouldn’t know if didn’t go for it. So far, we’ve knocked that one out of the park. 

Contact Info:

• Email: info@shophazellane.com
• Website: www.shophazellane.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shophazellane/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shophazellane