Every entrepreneur knows that risk is a part of the journey. Taking a chance on a fresh idea, leaving behind the nine-to-five grind for something of your own, and gambling everything on a dream can be a terrifying prospect.
For Paula Blankenship, the founder and Creative Director of Heirloom Traditions Paint, that risk couldn’t have been more clear-cut. After years of helping her sister manage their parents’ furniture store in Oneida, Tennessee, she’d weathered the 2008 recession with a transition into interior design for commercial projects, such as high-rise commercial buildings. Yet that gig required a monster commute from her new home in Louisville, Kentucky to New York City and other East Coast locations.
So, she went all-in on a risky proposition: turning her DIY paint e-commerce site into a full-time, full-fledged business venture. Eventually, Blankenship’s ideas and products would go on to disrupt the industry. Her first paint became the cornerstone product of her new enterprise, Heirloom Traditions Paint.
Blankenship first developed All-In-One Paint, a chalk-style paint with an aesthetically popular ultra-matte finish, to solve a challenging problem for the DIY home improvement market: simplifying the process of painting home furnishings, cabinetry, and other interior/exterior surfaces by reducing both complexity and cost.
That original product was almost a fluke, in a sense. Blankenship never set out to create a line of chalk paints. Instead, she was simply trying to design a piece of furniture. She decided that chalk paint was the best finish for the piece, due to its user-friendliness and overall matte aesthetic. Chalk paint also bonds well with almost any underlying material, including metal, wood, and even enamel paint. And the chalk paint she developed eventually came to dominate the market in just three short years.
Her flagship formulation, Finish-All-In-One Paint, can be applied easily to any surface, from metal and wood to leather and vinyl. And now Heirloom Traditions Paint is poised to break into the automotive industry, with two disruptive products: Restore Coat Paint, which does for cars what Finish-All-In-One does for furniture, and Restore Coat Repair Compound, a compound that easily patches and repairs ripped materials, such as the ripped dash pad of a car.
Blankenship says one of the best things she did for her new business as she began to grow it beyond the kitchen-based eBay operation it started out as was to embrace social media marketing.
Given that her products were aimed squarely at the DIY consumer home improvement market, she concluded that YouTube videos would be especially helpful in reaching her target audience. The company’s YouTube channel has over 15,000 subscribers and regularly features helpful product explainer, demo and how-to videos.
Her embrace of social media coupled with truly remarkable and high-performing products raised her company’s profile and created the kind of buzz that fuels niche product success. That higher profile has also resulted in increased media visibility. Blankenship appeared on the October 13th episode of MotorTrend TV’s popular show “Motorhead Garage” with hosts John Gardner and Dave Dobson. There, she demonstrated her latest creation, of which she is undeniably proud.
The patented Repair Compound in Heirloom Traditions Paint’s Repair Coat covers a wide range of tears, holes, burns and other types of damage. “It sounds like magic,” she says, “but it’s actually an easy-to-use DIY product that anyone can use to make a damaged vehicle interior look like new.” Like her other products, it was born out of a real desire to help solve very specific problems for consumers who want to revitalize the things they love, whether that’s a set of cabinets, a piece of furniture, or a car.
“Many people would rather refresh what they already own instead of buy something new,” Blankenship observes. “But DIY isn’t always easy or cost-effective.” Her All-in-One paints simplify the process and reduce the cost usually associated with sanding, stripping, priming, painting and sealing, for example.
It’s this deep understanding of her prospective customers that has fueled the success of Heirloom Traditions Paint. By assessing their pain points and brainstorming creative solutions that make her customers’ lives easier, she’s made good on that all-in gamble she made a few years ago.
Blankenship’s company began as a kitchen-based eBay store, with her teenage son offering after-school help to package customer orders for shipping. Those days are behind her now, as the company operates out of a warehouse and storefront in Louisville, Kentucky, in addition to a thriving e-commerce site. Now an international presence, Heirloom Traditions Paint has grown into a respected brand with a reputation for innovation and quality.
With that kind of success in the home improvement field, it may have seemed like an unnecessary risk to branch out with automotive products. To Blankenship, however, it all makes perfect sense. “I want to solve real-world DIY problems, wherever they occur, be that home, car or anywhere else,” she says. Visit https://www.heirloomtraditionspaint.com/.
