In an industry dominated by men, Jamie Beckwith, owner of Jamie Beckwith Collection LLC (Nashville, Tenn.), stands out.
In an industry dominated by men, Jamie Beckwith, owner of Jamie Beckwith Collection LLC (Nashville, Tenn.), stands out.
Beckwith was recently featured by Women@Forbes for being a female founder of a wood flooring manufacturing company.
When she introduced the company in 2009 at the Surfaces tradeshow in Las Vegas, she was a new name in a landscape filled with well-known personalities, and she told Forbes that at trade shows she had to face people who assumed she was a spokesmodel for the company instead of the owner.
“There was a lot of frustration, a lot of times even where I thought should we throw in the towel,” she said. “It wasn't a sprint, with any new business it's a marathon and you just have to have that endurance to get up another day.”
But her outsider status and small company size allowed her the freedom to innovate.
“The way that you would think of a lot of building products is definitely more male-dominated or a male-driven industry,” Beckwith told Forbes. “There were a lot of ways of doing things that were just the norm or considered the way that it was done.”
Just two years after she came on to the scene, Beckwith won an NWFA Wood Floor of the Year award for prefinished flooring.
Her tips for building a business? Build customer service, harness the web to compete with the whales, find a niche, be transparent and, she told Forbes, follow your dreams.
