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Women.com presents

Entrepreneur Gail Pittman
Starting Your Own Business

August 24, 1999

Entrepreneur Gail Pittman is with us today to talk about how she got her start manufacturing fine handpainted ceramics.

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HomeArts: Good afternoon, and welcome to our on-line chat with entrepreneur Gail Pittman. Gail is president of her own company, which manufactures fine handpainted ceramics. Gail designs each pattern herself for an exuberant line of handpainted ceramics. Now, she's joined with two other firms to make coordinating wall coverings and rugs. Welcome Gail!

Gail Pittman: Thank you! It's just a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to this - this is my first online chat, so this ought to be a lot of fun!

Samsmom: How do you come up with the ideas for your designs? What things do you look towards for inspiration?

Gail Pittman: For inspiration I most often look within myself. I usually have something brewing in my mind that I carry around with me for quite some time. I'm a color person - colors are very emotional, and I like things that cause an emotional response. It could be a leaf that would inspire me, or a flower, or the combination of colors in a flower. And I am often inspired by religious symbols. But inspiration can come from just most any place! You know, inspiration comes from working hard as well, and the more you work the more inspired you become.

Cookinmom: Did you always aspire to become a painter or did you have a different career goal in mind?

Gail Pittman: Well, my first career goal while I was in high school, growing up, was to be a folk singer or a rock star. But when I went off to college at Ole Miss, that quickly changed because I fell in love, went into the School of Education, graduated in three years, got married, and became a school teacher. It's always so interesting and a revelation to see what God had in mind for everybody's life, isn't it? I'm sure the music world is glad I never pursued that goal! I was at home with my children and after the birth of my second child I found myself fooling around with pottery at my kitchen table just for entertainment. I've always been creative, and one thing led to another until it just turned into a business.

EZguest54: Where did you find the resources to get your business off the ground?

Gail Pittman: Well, you know, when I started at home at my kitchen table, I used the money from anything I sold to buy more supplies. It just sort of kept going like that until my husband came home one day and told me that the business had outrun our home and it was either going to get a whole lot bigger or a whole lot smaller, but it just wasn't going to stay there like that! We went to the bank and the bank gave me a loan for $10,000 because they were impressed by the fact that I had paid for the growth of my business - at my kitchen table, however small it was - with the money I had earned from it. Now, of course, with the size of our company we get a lot of support from our state through bond issues and so forth.

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