Jayme Busch grew up selling polished rocks on a busy street in Bellevue and never really stopped selling something. By the time she sat down with Sam, she had been through Mary Kay, 31, color street nails, Tupperware, a $5,000 LuLaRoe package, a bankruptcy filing, a move to a town of 900, a 1988 work trailer turned mobile boutique, and two storefronts. Unique Boutique Iowa is the name that stuck, and this episode is the story of how she pivoted her way into it.
What You'll Hear
- Why Jayme says her great grandpa selling goods out of a van in Mexico is part of the family blood
- The November 5, 2016 phone call when her $5,000 LuLaRoe package got approved and a neighbor six miles away launched the same business the same week
- How she filed bankruptcy before marriage over about $25,000 of debt and what it cost her on credit cards, the house title, and car loans afterward
- The 1988 work trailer from Rasmussen she ripped down to studs and relaunched as a mobile boutique on Small Business Saturday during COVID
- The year of friction with another Neola business owner who accused her of copying, and the mentors who told her to keep her head down
- How the Boutique Hub motto of community over competition reshaped how she thinks about neighboring shops
- Her adult ADHD diagnosis, the husband who can read her overwhelm before she can, and why failure is not really an option
- The jump from substitute teaching to full time at Wilson Middle School to programming and then development at the AIM nonprofit in Council Bluffs
Rodeo wife, boutique owner, and a household always in motion
Jayme opens by listing the hats she wears. Rodeo wife, mom of three, boutique owner, softball coach, full time employee of a nonprofit. Her husband Joe is a pro rodeo calf roper and steer wrestler who recently took a horn to the rib cage in Spooner, Wisconsin and picked up a 30 day release.
She married into the rodeo world 13 years ago and describes it as a big small family. Performance horses in the $20,000 to $50,000 range get loaned between buddies at rodeos, a cut of the winnings goes to the horse's owner, and everybody helps everybody's kids down the road. It is the first community she names in the conversation, and it will not be the last.
When Sam asks about the rodeo mindset, Jayme brings up a previous guest's phrase, raise high and lift, and agrees with the underlying lesson. The natural instinct on a bucking horse is to brace. The actual skill is to loosen up and move with it. The metaphor carries through the rest of the interview, because most of what she has built has required exactly that kind of adjustment.
From polished rocks to MLMs to a $5,000 LuLaRoe package
Jayme has always sold something. Her mom will tell you she sold rocks as a kid, walking them up and down a busy street with a neighbor. An uncle in Lincoln, Nebraska later told her that her great grandfather used to drive to Mexico, bring goods back, and sell them out of a van. She laughs that it is in the blood.
The adult version started at 18 with Mary Kay. She was never the woman at the drive through complimenting a stranger's green eyes to book a party. She used the product, sold a little, moved on. 31 came next, a faith based bag company that has since closed. Body by Vi during her first pregnancy. Unique makeup, false lashes, mascara. Tupperware, because she loved Tupperware. Color street nails, paid for with birthday money from her dad and quietly stockpiled until it hit about $2,700 in the account.
The real plunge was LuLaRoe in November 2016. She convinced her husband, got a credit card in his name, and paid the $5,000 to reserve an inventory package. The catch was the model. You bought a cut and size breakdown, not specific prints. Black leggings were the unicorns. The business ran on Facebook Live selling before that was a widespread playbook.
She got her approval call, paid, opened Facebook, and saw that a woman six miles away in Underwood had just launched her own LuLaRoe. She could not walk it back, so she went forward. About a year of hard selling and a second year of winding down left her roughly $3,000 in the red. She calls it a failure, then immediately describes what came next.
A cross country partner, a work trailer, and a boutique built on weekends
The pivot came through a woman in Connecticut Jayme met through color street. They hit it off, started buying wholesale packs of graphic t shirts together, split inventory by size, tracked everything in Google Sheets, and shipped for each other. They never met in person. Jayme still has not met her.
She was running a Facebook page for each line, LuLaRoe, 31, color street, Tupperware, unique makeup, until she finally posted a poll asking her customers to pick a single name. They chose Unique Boutique Iowa. It went live out of her house and her partner's house, and then COVID hit.
The space she had been trying to rent on Main Street in Neola sold out from under her. So she and Joe bought a 1988 work trailer from Rasmussen, drove it home an hour and a half while the siding flapped in the wind, and Joe put gorilla tape on the side. She ripped the thing down to the studs that week. Her dad and her brother in law rewired the lights. She put up RFD board, barn tin from a friend, new floor, painted walls. It made its debut on Main Street on Small Business Saturday during COVID.
She ran it for a few years, then rented a former gas station in Underwood next to a friend's lounge bar. No bathroom, just electricity. She opened on Small Business Saturday again, the week after recovering from her first bout of COVID. She stayed there two and a half years before the owners of the building she had originally tried to rent reached back out. That Neola space is where she is today, three minutes from home, still open mostly on weekends.
A small town, a year of friction, and community over competition
Moving into Neola came with a year of trouble. Jayme is not from the area. Another local business owner, who ran a drink shop with some gift items, became convinced Jayme was copying her and was trying to push the little guy out. There were posts. There were text messages. There was an eventual conversation where the accusation was said out loud.
Jayme pushed back. She sells clothes. The other shop sells drinks and a few trinkets. She was not copying. She was stocking what was trending. She never responded publicly, and says she never will. She kept her head down and kept going.
The support came from two places. Her husband, who kept telling her to keep going. And the woman in Underwood who had opened LuLaRoe the same week Jayme did back in 2016, who has since grown a bigger boutique in Council Bluffs. That mentor and another from the Boutique Hub gave her the same message. People shop with you because they want the experience you give them. Keep going.
The Boutique Hub is a national group of boutiques and wholesalers, and its motto has become Jayme's guiding principle. Community over competition. She applies it to kids selling driveway signs for post prom, softball raffle tickets, and school fundraisers. If a parent asks on behalf of a kid, she says no. The kid has to ask, and there has to be a thank you. Her 13 year old daughter Addy wrote close to a hundred thank you notes last year for softball raffle buyers. The point is the same as the boutique principle. Show up, ask, and acknowledge the value you were given.
ADHD, a husband who reads her, and the AIM pivot
Late in the conversation Jayme names something that has only come into focus in the last couple of years. She has adult ADHD. She is not medicated. She has a psychology degree and jokes that it did not help her spot it in herself. What she has instead is a husband who can see the overwhelm before she can and pull her back down to earth, and three close friends who each play a different role. Alicia notices when she has not eaten or had water. One friend is a VP at a large company and talks her through marketing and sales strategy. Another is ten years ahead of her in life and fields questions about middle school parenting and small school politics.
The same pattern runs through her work history. After years at home with the kids, which she openly calls the hardest years of her life, she started doing drug screens and insurance screenings, then substitute teaching, then full time at Wilson Middle School in Council Bluffs through the tail end of COVID. AIM, a nonprofit, hired her on the programming side in the same schools where she was teaching. Late last year the marketing and events role opened and she took it. That is where she met Sam, who was the keynote at the AIM conference they had postponed since COVID. This summer she moved again, this time to the development side covering Southwest Iowa.
She does not celebrate wins well. She notices that and wants to work on it. Sam pitches a setup where close friends trade wins over dinner. She likes the idea. For now, her version is a hard stop day when she crashes, watches TV, and resets. When Sam asks who has been a giant in her life, the answer is her dad. Biggest cheerleader, no sugar coating, and nine times out of ten the thing she needed to hear.
About Jayme Busch
At the time of recording, Jayme Busch owned Unique Boutique Iowa in Neola, Iowa, a small town boutique she built over several years out of her home, a 1988 work trailer turned mobile shop, a former gas station in Underwood, and her current Neola storefront. She was also working full time on the development team at AIM, a Council Bluffs area nonprofit, and raising three daughters with her husband Joe, a pro rodeo calf roper and steer wrestler.