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PROVO — While in business school, Colby Bauer was often told to be cautious of starting a business relationship with family members because it can create tension and ruin relationships.
In spite of that cliché, Colby Bauer and his wife, McKenzie, are successfully running a minimalist wallet company. Thread Wallets are slim, elastic wallets with creative style and have two pockets on the outside, according to Colby Bauer.
Their first year of business brought in $134,000 in total gross revenue and $44,000 in profit. Their journey has brought challenges and success.
In some ways, the couple’s life together hasn’t been traditional. Colby Bauer said he thought he would start a business at some point, but he never knew it would be with his spouse.
The two basically started the business when they started dating. Colby Bauer said he thinks one of their first dates was her sewing their first wallet together.
“He was using me for my sewing machine,” McKenzie Bauer joked.
Right after they were married, they moved to Hawaii and Colby finished school. When they moved back to Utah in December 2014, they lived with McKenzie’s parents for about seven months, she said.
McKenzie Bauer said they took over her parent's house and there are still marks in the carpet and dents on their office desk from their equipment. “We just slept in the room that I literally grew up in,” McKenzie Bauer said. “My brother was down the hall, we shared a bathroom with my brother. And so it was like, definitely as a newly married couple, it’s not the ideal situation. But it’s part of our story, and we could not be where we are today with it if it weren’t for the sacrifice of my parents and sacrificing our own needs of like wanting our own space or whatever. Saving that money and being able to live there with them and using their space was exactly what we needed to get off the ground.”
The Bauers think there are benefits to working with a spouse. Whenever they have a business idea, they can bounce it off each other no matter what time of day it is. They are also flexible to work when they want, Colby Bauer said. The experience of starting a business together has not come without challenges, however.
Colby Bauer said it can be really hard to separate business and marriage.
“But there’s things that we’ve done to help kind of separate the two and try to make sure that our business relationship is separate from our marriage,” Colby Bauer said.
“I think if you are starting a business with a spouse or that’s something you want to do, just kind of like what Colby said about separating, you have to like realize, I have to remind myself that above anything else, Colby’s my husband,” McKenzie Bauer said. “And so he’s my husband before he’s my business partner, he’s my husband before he’s my graphic designer, he’s my husband before he’s my social media approval person, like whatever it is we’re doing or in the moment, I have to remind myself that that is his role and the more that I can remind myself of that, the more smoothly our business runs, because then I’m not like treating him negatively.”
