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Shannon Hart Gonzalez took a chance eight years ago to start her online mum business. Now the business is thriving with more than a dozen employees and thousands of mums and garters made each season. (Camilo Diaz | Fort Worth Report)
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​​Editor’s note: Made in Tarrant is an occasional Q&A series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Submit your business here. 

Mums and Kisses is an online and retail mum shop based in Crowley, Texas. Shannon Hart Gonzalez, the store’s owner, made homecoming mums as a side hobby for her children until the sticker shock from buying a flower and a few ribbons set her on a path to find a more inexpensive way to create standout mums for all. More than eight years later, her business has sold thousands of homecoming mums and garters, with orders coming in from as close as Joshua High School to as far away as Okinawa, Japan. Prices for her mums range from $39.95 to $525.

Gonzalez talked to Fort Worth Report’s Shomial Ahmad on how she started her business, what sacrifices she made, and mums she would make for Olympics stars Simone Biles and Snoop Dogg. 

Contact information:

Website: https://www.mumsandkisses.com/

Email: contact@mumsandkisses.com

Phone: 817-518-9000

Store address: 3708 County Road 920, Crowley

Shomial Ahmad: What drew you to making mums? 

Shannon Hart Gonzalez: I’m not really sure. I knew how to make mums, but it wasn’t a passion. It was more of an ask me and I will, type of thing. After my dad died, I was going through my desk and saw a receipt for a mum I had made for my son and was shocked at how much I paid for a flower and a few ribbons. I thought to myself, “How much should these things cost?” If I had this problem with the cost and quality of what you get, then other parents did too. 

Ahmad: How did you grow your business and how long did it take for you to make it?

Gonzalez: In July 2016, I spent 16 to 20 hours a day doing nothing but building a website that allowed customers to order a homecoming mum online. I didn’t want people to just make an appointment for a consultation but to allow customers to customize their mums online without having to leave the comfort of their couch.

Once the website went live, I held my breath. Magically, we sold our first homecoming mum three days after the website went live and then it didn’t stop. I was so shocked that people not only liked the designs but wanted them in droves. Life went from normal to warp speed, with 4 a.m. bedtimes and waking up again at 6 a.m. to take kids to school and then coming home to fill mum orders. 

I would ship mums anywhere customers asked me to. I’d pick the kids up at school. They would throw their backpacks on the floor and dive in to help me. Little did we know at the time, we were one of the first mum creators to ship mums in mass quantities where no one needed an appointment. 

We started out on the kitchen counter of our home — until we got tired of finding glitter in our food. In our first season online, we made it onto NBC News’ website and made a mum for a celebrity! The kids and I were so excited. We made a Marvel-themed mum for Audrey P. Scott, the girl who played Penny in the movie “Secretariat.” That was one of the hardest but most rewarding times of our lives.

Ahmad: What sacrifices did you make in order to make your business a success? 

Gonzalez: I probably sacrificed everything. Everything and everyone around me probably suffered at first. I had time for nothing else. I was on a mission. It was July 2016, and mum season had already started. I was behind. I needed to not only catch up, but build a first-of-its-kind website. I put a lot of pressure on myself that first season. If I didn’t succeed, then I would have sacrificed my kids for nothing. 

That first month, I was designing with scrap ribbon around the house. After that I found a supplier, and I cut back on my grocery budget to slowly buy supplies. Then I took another chance. I sacrificed my kids’ new school clothes money to buy the rest of the supplies for the season, something I would have never done before. I cried the whole way home from the suppliers, worrying about the chance I was taking and promising myself that I’d make it up to them. This had to work, and I knew it.

Sacrifices are always made when something is worth it. Out of all the sacrifices, it was when I was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer five years into the business that I thought I was going to have to make the most changes. Here we were in the middle of a pandemic, and mum sales were down by half. The kids weren’t going back to school in August, sales had slumped, and I had cancer. It was a shock out of nowhere. 

Luckily I found my own lump, but it meant I had to go through 16 rounds of chemo, 20 radiation treatments, three surgeries, and losing my hair. Mum season 2021 was coming around fast. We couldn’t afford to have another slumped season. So the day after my lumpectomy, I went back to work, wrapped in bandages. I wasn’t about to stay in bed, we had mums to make.

Ahmad: What are the highlights and the drawbacks of turning a hobby into a business?

Gonzalez: I’d have to say that the highlights are definitely seeing the faces of the kids who come and pick up their mums: the smiles, the jumping up and down, even crying sometimes. Just a few weeks before, they told me their ideas and concepts, and I get to create their mum, bring it to life. 

Another awesome highlight of mum making is donating mums to special needs classes. We started off with nine special needs students, and now we make mums for more than 150 special needs students per season. Special needs students have such a caring and unique way of thanking you for their mums. Some don’t speak, but yet we know what they’re trying to say. Some are in wheelchairs or walkers and we get to design ways for them to wear them like all the rest of the students without their equipment being in the way. We’ve created slings for one-armed students to wear garters, short and wide mums for students in wheelies, where they fly through the hallways, ribbons flowing. I love that part. 

There are a few drawbacks, going from hobby to business. Nobody tells you that you have to figure out inventory systems, barcoding and accounting software. And what used to be just a few months a year, now is almost year-round. The prepping, the preparing, opening of new supply websites, branching out, reaching more states and even more countries, selling on Etsy, Amazon, Walmart and Michaels, nothing prepares you for all that. What used to be something small is turning into an empire.

Ahmad: When is the high demand season? How do you handle the volume of requests?

Gonzalez: Our absolute busiest season is from August to November, when kids go back to school and find out when their homecoming game is. The website takes order after order until you have to turn off the sound notification on your phone. The supplies, both in-store and online, go out of stock every other day. You have to keep making and keep ordering, more and more. By Labor Day, we can’t breathe. That’s when we go into 20-hour days. Luckily my kids are older now and can drive themselves to school.

There are a lot of people who help now, with around 13 here and six in Mexico who make mums, braids, bases, work at the store, and ship the products. I don’t personally make as many mums as I used to. I concentrate on the huge mega mums or overly customized ones. I do the other work: solving problems, answering questions, dealing with vendors and suppliers, making payroll and making sure the place doesn’t catch on fire, even though I’m usually the one running around with my clipboard and head cut off the most.

Ahmad: How do you source your supplies? What are the different materials that make a really special, standout mum?

Gonzalez: I use the off season to source supplies. My favorites are from India and Central and South America. I like to bring in things people haven’t seen before on a mum: different bling, rhinestones and satin ribbon. We make a lot of our own supplies now and have a line of ribbons we make too. Finding the diamond in the rough — the one thing that will make a mum super sweet or extra special — those are the things I look for the most. I’m traveling to places that I never would have just to find new supplies, and I’m making plans to go to Vegas to meet suppliers. Life is wild now. 

Ahmad: Do you have any advice on how one should design their own mum? 

Gonzalez: My best advice is to “do you.” This is not your mom’s mum, your grandma’s mum or your aunt’s. This is YOUR mum. You only get a few in your life and you should get what you want. Choose your school colors until you’re a senior, then pick your signature colors. Go rogue and do hot pink and black if that’s your style, or rose gold and champagne, if that is more you. A mum is school spirit and an expression of yourself. So you, do you!

Ahmad: If you made a mum for Simone Biles and Snoop Dogg what would they look like?

Gonzalez: For Simone, I’d make a mum that matches her outfit, red, white and blue. It would be a leg mum, attached at her thigh so that when she moves you would see it fly. It couldn’t be too big, maybe about 6 to 8 inches wide and 12 inches long. It would have to have a gold medal in the centerpiece and her name down the ribbons.

For Snoop, I’d make a slick-looking garter mum, worn on his arm, something all black with silver accents. Names of his hit songs would be written on ribbon down the front. Maybe I would put his face as a centerpiece in the flower and the words “Drop it like it’s hot” across the front.

Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, in partnership with Open Campus. Contact her at shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.

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