Featured Speaker at the Stonecraft Christian Women's Connection

I recently had the pleasure of being the Featured Speaker at the Stonecraft Christian Women’s Connection on Tuesday, March 19th, 2024 at the Norfolk Country Club in Norfolk, Nebraska. Several women reached out to me after the program with nice compliments. And other reached out saying they were sorry they missed it. So I am sharing my speech for those who missed it. I didn’t read it word for word and may have went off-script for a bit, but you’ll get the gist of it.

Contents

Introduction
Presentation
Postscript

Introduction

Introduction: Kim (Rowley) Lohrberg has had several titles over the years including, but not limited to: Blogger, Mom, Hustler, Executive, Consultant, Money Nerd, Strategist, Entrepreneur, Author, Professor, Speaker, and is currently testing out cool Grandma titles.

And my business, Bend The Trend, was the sponsor of the program:

Bend The Trend is not your typical fancy, upscale boutique. Bend The Trend sells overstock and closeout merchandise from major department stores including Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Target, and more, so customers can buy trendy name brand apparel, shoes, accessories and home goods at affordable prices.

Presentation

Thank you for having me. I thought I’d start off with a little background on myself and how I got to where I am today.

I got pregnant at age 17 and married at 18. We had four children by the time I was 25 including a set of twins that were born 13 weeks early weighing 2 pounds each. My husband then worked a rotating shift, and the physicians’ clinic that I worked for let me work around his schedule so we didn’t have to pay for as much daycare.

I’ve always been a savvy shopper, and we lived very frugally. I religiously cut coupons from the Sunday paper, matched up sale ads and sent in refunds. Soda pop was a luxury.

On top of having 4 kids, 2 with special needs, working and taking college night classes – it took me 9 years to complete my college degree from Wayne State, I also started building websites. One of the doctors that I worked with, Dr. Bert Frichot and I shared a love of computers, and he had bought me a book on HTML so I could learn how to make websites. This was before Google even.

I started making websites about my different passions: my preemie twins, my love of shoes and fashion, my son’s love of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, but the website that went viral as they call it today, was my couponing website where I shared deals.

When I discovered that I could make money with affiliate marketing on my websites, where online merchants like Target and Walmart would pay me a commission for sharing their deals, it suddenly made my hobby much more fun.

My first purchase with my fun money was a dishwasher! Eventually my hobby paid for my then husband’s hobby of getting his private pilot license, and we bought an airplane! I let him have that in the divorce.

I set up my corporation. Key Internet Marketing, Inc. – acronym KIM. I quit working at the doctor’s office and I haven’t had a “real” job since.

When coupon and deal websites became very competitive, and this mom-and-no-pop shop could not compete with the corporate big wigs, so I had to shift gears, and I decided to focus more on blogging – my main website was ShoppingKim.com (I’m Kim) and I dabbled selling stuff on the internet. I also did consulting and was an adjunct professor for the University of San Francisco teaching affiliate marketing.

In 2010, T.J. Maxx flew a few bloggers to Boston to tour their facilities with hopes that us bloggers would write about and promote them. It was then that I was intrigued by how liquidation merchandising worked, but I already had too many irons in the fire. .

Liquidation merchandising is buying and selling of overstock, closeout, last-season, or even returned merchandise and reselling it for less than retail. Stores that operate this way besides T.J.Maxx are Ross, Burlington, the former Gordman’s and Marshall’s, which is now owned by T.J.Maxx.

In early 2020, before the world shut down for Covid, I finally decided to pull the trigger and buy some liquidation pallets – they were delivered to my garage. And when the pandemic hit, not only did my online sales skyrocket, but ShoppingKim became even more popular because I had a lot of content about consumer financing.

Then I got an offer to sell ShoppingKim.com that I couldn’t refuse. And as part of the sale, I had a one-year no-compete clause. So I took that as an opportunity to really dig deep into liquidation merchandising. So while 2020 was a good year for me and my business, the world lost my original mentor, Dr. Frichot to Covid.

Now my business has gone from getting pallets delivered to my garage, to renting several storage units, and now I buy liquidation by the truckloads and have them delivered to our warehouses. So, what do I do with all this liquidation?

Well, we are in the top 5% of third-party sellers on Amazon. You may have ordered from us, and you didn’t even know it, as we ship our inventory directly to Amazon warehouses for them to ship out to Amazon Prime customers. 60% of all Amazon sales are third-party sellers which are actually small and medium size businesses. We also sell on Walmart Marketplace.

A few years ago, we also started having “Liquidation Popup” sale events, and we still hold about one event per month (in fact, we just had one Sunday where everything we sold was $5 each). Popups are short-term, temporary retail events, more seen in urban retail settings. It’s at these events that we sell our overstock items, our Amazon/Walmart returns, and things that we can’t or don’t want to sell online.

But we started getting more and more requests for fashion clothing and bigger, nice items plus requests for more open hours, so the idea of a “liquidation boutique” was born. So at Bend The Trend, we sell only brand new merchandise, and most clothing items are only $10 – no matter what the price tag says. We have clothing from Macy’s department stores, Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom Rack, Target and many other high-end retailers. We also carry shoes, handbags, jewelry and home goods at deeply discounted prices of 75-90% off retail prices.

Bend The Trend is located at 200 Braasch Ave in downtown Norfolk, which is one block north of Norfolk Avenue and one block west of the new round-a-bout on 1st Street. We are only open Thursdays 12 pm – 6 pm and Saturdays from 10 am – 2 pm – this was a marketing move to emphasize urgency as our inventory changes every week. We do have a website at bendthetrend.com, but the items online are only a small fraction of what we sell at the boutique because it is too tedious and time consuming to add all of the items that we get, especially when we only get one of a kind items.

I have a few lovely retired ladies that currently work for me, and I must say that retired ladies are the best loyal employees I’ve ever had! And I’m not just saying that because Aunt Squeak is here today and one of my first workers.

Everyone should have received a wooden rose with a coupon for Bend The Trend at your place setting. And ten of you should have a dot on the back of your coupon. If so, you are the lucky winner of one of our designer-inspired fragrances that we sell at the boutique.

Postscript

I did not realize when I was invited to this “Women’s Connection” that it was a Christian organization, nor that it was sponsored by Stonecraft. I obviously should’ve done my homework beforehand! But I was pleasantly surprised and happy that there are so many women out there spreading the Gospel.

Had I done my homework, I probably would’ve included some tidbits about my faith and trust in God. And included this Bible verse:

Mark 11:24 (NIV) says, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” This verse can be interpreted to mean that if you have faith and believe in the fulfillment of your desires, they will manifest.

You can read more about me here.