Gabby Goodwin on Starting Her Business

Hi, I'm Gabby Goodwin. I am 14 years old, and I'm from Columbia, South Carolina. I am the CEO of Confidence and the inventor of GaBBY Bows, what made me decide to start my company was me just losing barrettes all the time when I was little, uh, my mom would, you know, spend 15, 20 minutes doing my hair in the mornings, and then she would drop me off at school and then pick me up and find that half of my bows were gone. And then my hair was a complete mess and she was not only wasting time in the mornings, but also wasting lots of money. And she was going to the store every single week to buy these barrettes. And so she actually went on Twitter to rant about how my bows didn't stay in my hair. And after her and many other moms were talking about, you know, how terrible these barrettes were, our pastor actually jumped into the conversation and said, sounds like a market you need to break into. 

And so my mom told me I was about five years old and I didn't necessarily know what entrepreneurship was, but I did know that I wanted to inspire people. And I saw this as a way to do that. And I nagged my mom every single day about these barrettes. You know, when she would pick me up from school, "Mommy, are we going to work on my barrette?" Uh, grocery shopping, "Are my bows going to be sold in this store?" Uh, I was super excited to, I guess, just create a product. I didn't have to sell it or distribute it out, but I did want to solve the problem. And then I was able to help many girls as I started the business when I was seven in 2014. And we've been in business for seven years. 

The whole Process, you know, started at the kitchen table. We would use the barrettes that we already had and kind of evaluate them and see what was wrong and how we can make it better. We actually did not really want to start on, my mom didn't really want to start a business because she had a lot of things going on. We actually tried to pursue to sell the idea to somebody as you could see, that did not work, but, um, we were able to through that business, we're able to get connected to engineers who connected us to manufacturers, and they were able to get the first set of GaBBY bows made. And those are the manufacturers that we actually still work with today. And so it's kind of, we would not honestly be where we were, uh, at the time we probably would've started, uh, later if we did not try to sell the product because we met the people that made the products through that business.