My PupPup Jack Daniels/Instructables Independence Contest

Hi!  My name is Natalie Koziell and my birthdate is February 15, 1973.  Yes, I'm going to be 40 next year, yikes (!) so its time to turn what I love from a part time passion project to a full time career where I have the independence to control my own future.  I love to be creative. I've always painted, drawn, knit, crocheted, sewed - any activity where there once was just materials and then there is a finished piece.  Its something that really makes me happy.

One of the happiest days of my life was two years ago when we brought our beautiful dog Bella into our family which led to creating this business.  Bella is a Cavachon, one of many new mixed breeds, but when you go to the store you only see items with the most popular breed names like Terriers, Labs and German Shepherds.  We saw there was an under serviced community and decided to do something about it by creating our on line store mypuppup.com where whether you have a Pug or a Puggle you can purchase an item with their breed on it.  This is more than just a site to order customized merchandise, we plan to make My PupPup a lifestyle brand like Life is Good, but specifically for dog owners.

I have always talked about going into business for myself one day and no longer have my life dictated to me by someone else, I want independence.  This is the right business at the right time in my life.  Now that we have invested in equipment and the online store is on its way to being fully launched we need to take this to the next step by marketing like crazy and producing more product especially our line of Limited Edition Ts - I have so many design ideas for those!  My biggest problem is time - not having enough of it to give to this passion since I still have to work full time.  

I've been trying to figure out a way to run mypuppup full time and when I saw the Independence Contest I knew I had to enter.  Winning the Jack Daniels/Instructables Independence contest would allow me to quit my current full time job and really get mypuppup.com up and running.  I am so ready to turn this into my career and let my passion loose.  With the prize money I would be able to rent office space as I will quickly outgrow my 12x12 room!  I would add more options in interactivity for custom designing product on the current website.  Additionally I would like to do grass roots marketing like visiting dog parks across the USA.  My goal is to grow the business to the point where I'll be able to build a team and give them the same chance at independence that I had.