"The AngelStar adventure began by accident in 1991. During the Gulf War, Juliet had wanted to focus positive energy on a very negative situation. She added a small $2 cupid angel pin to a yellow ribbon she was wearing. Her intention was to have a daily reminder to focus on Angelic assistance for the troops and families during these difficult times. It was more important to focus on positives and Angelic assistance during the war than to dwell on the negativity that surrounded it.
One day, for some reason, Juliet took the small angel pin off her sweater and set it on the counter of our little gift store as she went to lunch. When she returned, she looked for the pin and it was nowhere to be found. She learned that our employee had mistakenly sold it to a customer for $10.00. At the time, we carried 14K gold pins and the employee had confused this inexpensive $2.00 pin with the $10.00 14K pins and charged the customer the top price for it. After learning what had happened, we called the customer to tell her that the pin was not a $10.00 pin and she could return it for a refund, or purchase the correct pin. We offered to give her a yellow ribbon to put on any pin she wanted, but the customer refused. She did not want to part with the pin because it was so very special to her. The customer only wanted the one she had and did not care what she paid for it. She was adamant that she did NOT want any other replacement. We all felt bad about the overcharge so we sent her a full refund in the mail and let her keep the pin too.
After seriously thinking over what had happened with the pin, I thought that perhaps we should offer yellow ribbon angel pins for sale at our store. Then I thought a bit larger. If we liked the idea, maybe other stores would like them too. We were not wholesalers and we had no idea how to go about selling what we had in mind. We did know how we purchased products so we called one of our best sales reps to ask questions. It just so happened that the San Francisco Gift show was being held the following week. Well, something that NEVER happens did happen. After talking with us, our rep agreed to take the pins to this major Gift Show for us. The sales rep followed her intuition and made a choice that was against her better business judgment. She knew that we had no experience in how to do this, yet she had faith in our being able to figure it out. Amazingly, within the next 2 months she had sold over 30,000 yellow ribbon Angel pins all over the USA. Not totally knowing what we were doing never stopped us. Orders were shipped & customers were taken care of. We knew what we would expect from a vendor we were buying from, so we used that as our guidepost. So many amazing stories and experiences came to us from these little pins. It was a very hectic, but an exciting experience to say the least…
Thank goodness the war soon ended. With the ending of the war, we found that we now had over 10,000 Angel pins that now needed a home. We had no idea what to do next… Then the thought came to us to transform these into PEACE angel pins, and thus our wholesale business expanded into another new direction. We really had not made much money with the yellow ribbon pins, but they had paid for the Peace pins, which gave us a start. For the next year or so, we reinvested everything that we made into new products and ideas that came to us. With basically no money and a lot of hard work, we grew into a business that focuses on producing inspiring products for sale on a national (and now an international) level. We started by creating angelically inspired lapel pins, bookmarks, stickers, journals, cards and gifts that were sold to retail stores and businesses across the country. In 3 short years, by the end of 1994 we had sold over 1 million Angel products. This was remarkable considering we had begun with nothing except a chain of events brought about by an employee making a MISTAKE."
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