Power Your Passion: Corrine’s Story

Yesterday, we brought our recently launched Power Your Passion initiative to your attention and asked for you to share your personal story about building your brand and how ShopStyle Collective has helped get you there. Today, I want to share Corrine from Mint Arrow’s story, written in her own words . . .

When I became a mother at age 28, I really thought that was going to be it for me! I would stay home, bake bread, make perfect meals, fold laundry, take my baby to the park in her pretty little pram, and live in the eternal bliss of motherhood. Well, I got the staying home part down pretty quickly and although I liked cooking, it was too cold to go anywhere outdoors, and I found myself pretty quickly going from newborn baby heaven to slipping into the darkness of baby blues.

If you’ve experienced that too, you might get a pit in your stomach just thinking about it.

It feels lonely; it feels emotionally uncontrolled; it tastes like eating the same junk food over and over because you can’t get the courage or strength or energy to leave the house; it smells like you haven’t showered in 3 days because you haven’t; it looks like your hair is in a greasy topknot again today because who are you going to see anyway? It sounds like an empty home with an occasional crying baby, and most of all it feels like, “why am I going crazy feeling so overwhelmed when all I have to do is change diapers and breastfeed? Is it really that hard? Why does everyone else make this look so easy, and what is wrong with me?”

My husband came home from work to my eyes welling up with tears and soft sobs every single night. He would take me in his arms and ask with the sincerest concern, “what’s wrong?” to which my most honest reply was, “I don’t know. I just feel so sad.”

Luckily I had friends and family and a very wise doctor who helped me realize what I was experiencing wasn’t total failure at motherhood; it was postpartum depression, and it was normal and, most importantly, it did not make me a bad mom. 

But the most important factor in feeling better was getting OUT. Out of the house. Out the door. Out every day. Out for a diet coke. Out for a car wash. Out for ANYTHING really. Just out.

So we tried the car wash thing a couple times and we did plenty of diet coke runs, but those only took 5 minutes, so we wound up shopping, and we were shopping a lot! But money was tight and I couldn’t spend every dime my husband was making so I turned all that shopping into window shopping pretty quickly. 

And then I discovered this thing.

This thing I was really good at! And my thing was finding deals. I found deals everywhere I went! I found deals on clothes, furniture, baby gear (I loved baby gear on sale — still do!) — I was finding deals everywhere I went. And I figured, okay, if I’m finding these deals anyway, might as well help someone out! 

So I started posting my deal finds on my personal Instagram with the hashtag #someonegobuythis, and you know what? My friends were loving it. “MORE!” they demanded. “Turn this into a business!” they encouraged. So I did just that. I launched Mint Arrow 3 years ago and I really believe that passion pulled me out of one of the darkest times of my life. 

Everyone’s passion isn’t going to be shopping for deals, but it was mine. And now fast forward to today: I’m using tools like ShopStyle’s widgets to pick out the best sale finds for my readers to browse the best things from a huge sale in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours, literally. I still kind of can’t believe that something that was started almost accidentally has become such a huge reality for my family, for my readers, for a community I’ve built over time online. 

Working alongside motherhood isn’t for everyone, and my life admittedly is pretty weird in some aspects. But I honestly feel like God gave me this incredible gift of pairing one of my passions with sharing useful information with people and allowing me to work from home, and for that I feel an abundance of gratitude every night when I go to sleep.

xo,

Corrine