HERstory

Hello all and welcome to my boutique! My name is Emily, and I am the owner of Rose Lane Boutique. I am a recent college graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Stout who obtained a degree in Retail Merchandising and Management with a Concentration in Buying and Product Management as well as a Minor in Business Administration (a mouthful, I know). During my time in college, I had dreams of becoming a buyer for a corporate company and hopefully working my way up to senior buyer over the next 5+ years. Post graduation, I moved to what I like to call the "middle of nowhere Wisconsin" for a boy (silly me, lesson learned). A few months into the move, I was talking with some of my close friends about starting an online boutique. I had seen so many people around me starting one and thought, “If they can do it, then so can I!”. I was lucky enough to do an internship in college where we used a major wholesale website with hundreds of vendors that I still had access to. In my free time, I started looking at the different vendors and doing some trend forecasting research. Finally, in October 2021, I pulled the trigger and registered my business and really began the process. It’s been a slow burning one, due to working a full-time job on top of this, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way. Words can not even begin to describe how excited I am.

The name “Rose Lane” packs a lot of meaning into it. In short, I took both of my grandma’s names, Rosella and Elaine, and shortened them to create Rose Lane. My gramma Elaine ran her own business from way before I was born all the way until she was 94 years old, and had to stop due to medical reasons. She’s been an inspiration throughout this process, and I’m so grateful to have a role model like her to look up to.

I also need to shout out my all time favorite professor and retail dad, George Duychak, who taught me a majority of everything I needed to know to start this. He was the professor who took me to almost all of my trade shows during my time in college, and ran the internship program I went through. George always had stories to tell about his 35+ years of retail management, and his lectures/lessons play through my head and remind me of things that I apply to my everyday life, with the boutique, and my current leadership role that I have at my job. He told me that he would assign me certain roles during the internship because he knew how badly I wanted to be a buyer, and he wanted me to get all of the experience that I could before graduating and going off into the world. Thank you Dr GeoD for helping me find my passion and always believing in me. I know you’d be proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I wish you could see what I've created.