Scott designed her first jewelry collection while pregnant with her first son, hand-wiring each piece with semi-precious stones. For years, she made jewelry as gifts for her friends, but in the retail space, she’d always felt like there was expensive, or low-quality, but nothing in between. So she set out to make high-quality jewelry at accessible price points.
“He was actually sitting on my lap and went to my first sales calls, going store to store with me. He was my little sales rep,” Scott said. “Babies do sell product, you know, babies and puppies. Bring them on your sales call. It works.”
Scott told The School of Hard Knocks she had “a scary relationship” with debt. She said she put up everything she owned up as collateral in order to secure loans. “I knew that if I didn’t make those loan payments or if I didn’t sell the product, I was gonna get that loan called. And that meant I was gonna be B-R-O-K-E,” she said. But that pressure forged discipline. “It made me be a very disciplined business owner. Even today, with a billion-dollar brand, every single dollar we spent, I look at it and make sure it’s gonna work for us.”
When asked about retail’s future, Scott was emphatic. “Oh, honey, retail is so alive. And brick-and-mortar is not dead. Four walls are a place where you build community and build brand awareness. We need human touch. It can’t just be digital, and you’re able to do that in brick-and-mortar. Build brick-and-mortar for experience first. Connection over transaction. The transaction will follow.”
The jewelry business margins, she noted, “are really good. They’re good margins.”
But her most important advice had nothing to do with business strategy. “Leave your fingerprint. You’ve got one chance at this life. Your life is a grain of sand. Make it matter, whatever you do in your life. You have a reason that you are here. You have a reason to affect people in a positive way. Figure out what that is. And if you can do that through business like I’m doing, awesome, but leave your mark.”
You can watch the entire interview with Kendra Scott and The School of Hard Knocks below:
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
