Today we’d like to introduce you to Sophia Maroon.
Hi Sophia, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hi, I’m Sophia. I make Dress It Up Dressing, a line of salad dressings available at retailers nationwide.
I started the business in 2012 while raising young children in the wake of an unexpected divorce. Salad dressing wasn’t the plan, just keeping my children intact while navigating a new landscape and finding a way to support our family was the only goal. I’m a film-maker by trade, but the travel demands of that career were incompatible with single parenthood.
My younger brother had long held the idea that there was a business to be had in our mother’s salad dressing. I’d been making the same dressing since I’d left home, so with nothing to lose, I set out to prove him right or wrong, but at a minimum to get him to stop talking about it. 🙂
I started sharing dressing with friends and within a month, due to total serendipity, someone from Whole Foods had tried the dressing, taken it to the buyer for our region, who had said, “if you can make this properly, we’ll put it in one of our stores.”
When an opportunity like that presents itself, you can’t say no. This is a much longer story, and I don’t want to make it sound too melodramatic, but at a time in my life when I was a little rudderless, here was a direction and a tiny glimmer of opportunity. It seemed compatible with motherhood, and something to pour my energy and creativity into that might be a pathway out of the personal drama.
Since that day – 14 years ago – one opportunity after another has presented itself, that has provided the motivation and inspiration to keep going, even on the hardest days. The enormous amount of gratitude I feel for the opportunities that have been presented to me, and the way this business has enabled me to raise three incredibly healthy, happy children, who have grown up watching me create a business that I love while learning the power of hard work and possibility, is a powerful motivating force that fuels me every day.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No! You name it! There have been countless struggles.
Food & Bev is a very welcoming and wonderful community – who doesn’t love food and people who make food? But the world of Consumer Packaged Goods is a little less hospitable and requires a lot of money in a very competitive environment.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Dress It Up Dressing?
Dress It Up is known for making clean label salad dressings that feel home-made.
Our dressings are olive-oil based and we don’t compromise on ingredients or quality.
What I’m most proud of is the fact that we have been asked to make compromises (lower your price, just use Canola Oil, add Xanthan Gum) but we never have. We have chosen the difficult route rather than the easy one and worked really hard to maintain our standards even when it posed challenges to the business.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Isn’t there an expression about this? Luck is opportunity meets preparation?
I think we’ve had a healthy dose of good opportunity meeting preparation. We have also had to pass on opportunities because we weren’t ready.
We have the phrase “How Serendipitous” written on the wall in our office because it has happened too many times for it to not feel relevant. Whether it’s a call from a buyer on a day when you want to throw in the towel, or an Amazon review that makes you remember why you put in all the blood, sweat, and tears. Things happen when you open yourself up to them and Dress It Up has been an opening from the start.
Life is full of luck, good and bad, and you just have to roll with it. We all get knocked about a bit, but I really believe the hard things make you realize how strong you are and what you’re capable of and if you go through enough of them, you feel pretty secure that you can always find your center and return to joy. Dress It Up has had some really wonderful things happen and some really rough things, but I can’t look at 14 years in business growing something I love and feel anything but lucky. We exceeded my definition of success many years ago. Whether that’s because we were lucky or because we were prepared when the opportunity presented itself, I don’t know. I know we worked really hard!
Pricing:
- High quality ingredients
- Fair value
- Value for money
- You get what you pay for
- Expensive or inexpensive!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dressitupdressing.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dressitupdressing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Dressitupdressing
