We're almost throwing rocks at our enemies.

Like, we're going to throw rocks that together.

I hate that it comes after Black Friday when everyone's already spent all their money with the big box stores. Now it's like we're launching 30 new things every single week. So it could be like an hour long phone call with me and it's my voice. Hi, I'm Ashley Alderson, which is so creepy. And a bad year will not kill your business if you let it. That was Ashley Alderson, founder of the boutique hub, a 14 year old membership and education

company for independent boutique retailers, with over 7,000 paying members in counting.

Today she's getting into the holiday she invented to fight back Black Friday, the 30 creatives

a week system she runs after Meta's update, and the AI voice clone of

herself that she gave her members. And we didn't tell you hear about the mentor line, about a bad

year that I have not been able to stop thinking about ever since she shared it. Let's get into it.

Ashley, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So I want to talk about how you've built this incredible business, because it hasn't just happened like flash overnight. You've been doing this for 14 years. Like how does that sound when you hear that? Oh, there's a lot of lessons packed into 14 years. I don't know. It seems like a long time in this world. It's a huge, like in the internet years. It's like, yeah, that's a, that's a gigantic amount

of time. I've had a lot of gray hairs, lived a few different lives, I think, iterated a few times. Yeah. So let's talk about that. Like the iteration of the business and how it's grown and blossomed into what it is today. It didn't start there. So like, let's talk about the beginnings of it. Where did the initial idea come from?

So initially, I grew up in North Dakota,

middle of nowhere, not a lot of places to So let's talk about the beginnings of it. Where did the initial idea come from?

So initially, I grew up in North Dakota, middle of nowhere, not a lot of places to shop. And I had an opportunity to do some traveling, like college after college, first career, that sort of thing. And I fell in love with boutiques. Like I just fell in love with... What do you mean by a boutique? Like just an independent retailer, whether it was downtown in a big city or it was like a rodeo in Reno, Nevada, and it was a pop-up booth. But it was all this cool stuff I couldn't find when I got back home. And this was sort of like pre-social media days, right? This is going way back. And so I thought, man, if I could just build a place for people like me in the middle of nowhere, because I felt like fashion specifically was New York and it was L.A., but there's a whole segment of us that are not that. And boutiques to me were

that thing. So I thought, if I could just build this place where we could all find these cool

stores and it's like an online shopping mall, like that would be the thing. And what I realized,

I worked in economic development before starting this idea. And I had this main street, small town, 1600 people. There was two stores on the main street. There was like a department store and a Western store. And one day, the Western store announced to the community, they were going out of business. And I'm like, oh, you know, shoot, that's terrible, but what are we going to do about it? Pretty soon the next day, the department store comes into my office and they say, hey, you have to help us. We have to do something to put somebody else in this Western store. And I was like, why? Like now you can carry their lines. You've got more people come into your business. Like there was two and others one. And they're like, wait, you don't understand. Wherever two or more like businesses come together, you become a destination. And I was like, huh, okay, this is like a huge light bulb moment for me. And so I eventually, like within a couple of years, we moved from North Dakota to Wisconsin. And I kind of carry this concept. I have an opportunity after leaving economic development to build this online shopping mall

of boutiques.

And so it was that idea of community over competition from those two stores where they came together

and created a destination.

It was kind of the fuel for what I wanted to create at the hub.

And so I started by building the online shopping mall of boutiques, but I ran into a chicken

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