- Just as an entrepreneur working for yourself, you learn to be okay with uncertainty.

So every day I kind of just try to make sure that it doesn't affect my business too much.

Hi, I'm Merrie Casteel, and I'm the owner of Simply Color Lab and Social D Products.

We're located in Akron, Ohio.

We launched it as Simply Canvas, just doing gallery wrap canvases for professional photographers only.

And then that turned into many other products for professional photographers.

My business partner has been an entrepreneur his whole life.

I come from having a job.

Working for myself was frightening.

Honestly, if you get past the fear of it, you don't want to do anything else.

Here we are, this is all new.

This is all different, but not everyone is sitting around all day trying to look for the opportunities in the middle of this crisis.

Everyone got handed the exact same problem at the exact same time.

And everyone's working at the same pace.

Nobody has an advantage right now.

In terms of what you can find to happen right now for your business, the sky's the limit.

We have to figure out what's going on, and assume this is gonna go on forever.

Like I just think I want to be a part of whatever it is that can get businesses back open.

I knew that these stickers were going to become a thing.

I'd already seen people putting out the duct tape when they started to reopen.

So I have a printing company.

One of the things we did when we brainstormed was, well, I guess it's three things, what needs done?

How can we repurpose everything we already have?

And then what can we do to make it different?

And that's where it came in that our stickers are kind of fun, or inspirational.

I would say 10 days, a website, full design, launched, ready to go.

Integrating it with our current business wasn't a problem.

And that was the beauty of the idea.

And that's why we settled on it.

Our suppliers got us the proper sticker material.

And the new printers we had just upgraded to were the ones you want for these stickers.

So that played out well.

The main thing that I think has been our struggle has been competing with other people doing it, and finding the people that need it.

There are a lot of places you can buy stickers.

But ours are a little more unusual.

Maybe it doesn't have to be so scary.

Maybe it could just be fun, you know.

We have a lot of designs, but you can also create your own.

I think everyone's in the same boat.

And I think that's the thing that makes you feel better.

Every single company, every single employee is experiencing the same crisis.

And that's really rare.

And to be lasting this long, I don't know, I'm hoping that that means everyone's working for a solution, if we're all worried about the same one singular problem.

(uplifting music)