What motivates you when things get tough? Please be detailed and explain why.
There’s a specific memory I go back to from the early WeddingReports.com days, a stretch where I almost shut the whole thing down over cash flow. What got me through wasn’t some big mindset shift, it was one vendor telling me to give it 90 more days before I made any decision. That’s basically become my rule now. When things get hard I give it a real runway before I let myself react, and most of the time the problem sorts itself out in that window.
Tell us 3 surprisingly easy and 3 surprisingly difficult things about your business.
Easy ones. Landing vendor partnerships took almost no convincing. I already had 15 years of trade show relationships before GroovyGroomsmenGifts.com even launched. Pricing wasn’t hard either. Groomsmen gifts have a pretty tight range, and I knew it cold from WeddingReports.com data. And honestly, the branding came fast. Groomsmen gifts practically sell themselves once you get the humor right.
Hard ones. Inventory timing during peak wedding season still trips me up some years, demand spikes in ways that don’t match last year’s numbers. Managing 50-plus vendors at once means something’s always slightly off somewhere, that never fully goes away. And scaling past a certain order volume, somewhere around 10,000 orders, meant rebuilding fulfillment from scratch because what worked small didn’t hold up.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
I love that I get texts from customers telling me the groomsmen cried opening their gifts, that never gets old after 30,000 orders. I love untangling a vendor problem before a customer even knows there was one, that’s the part of the job most people never see. And I love that I can trace this whole business back to a decision I made in 2003 to start WeddingReports.com instead of staying in corporate marketing.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
Relationship building is probably the one that’s carried me furthest, straight from my trade show years, that’s how I built out 50-plus vendor partnerships without ever doing cold outreach. I can also usually tell within the first order or two whether a vendor’s going to hold up under volume, that comes from just paying attention long enough to spot the pattern. And then there’s patience on the operations side, which sounds boring but scaling to 30,000 orders taught me that fixing things fast usually creates a bigger mess than fixing them right the first time.
Tell us about a time where you saw a surprising outcome that you did not expect.
Early on, I thought more product options meant more sales, so I kept adding vendors and SKUs. Turns out I was wrong. Order completion actually dropped once the catalog got too big. People got stuck comparing instead of buying. I cut it back to our strongest sellers and conversions went up right away. That one caught me off guard and it’s the reason I still push back when someone on my team wants to add more without cutting something else first.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
Quality control across 50-plus vendors, every day, no exceptions. One vendor slips and it’s my name on that order, not theirs. I handle it by pulling fulfillment numbers every week myself instead of waiting for a report to land in my inbox. If a vendor can’t hold the standard I cut ties fast, I learned that lesson the expensive way early on.
What is a habit you try to stick to and how has it helped you?
I read every single one-star review myself, I don’t let anyone filter that for me first. Started doing it back when we were small enough that I had no choice, and I never stopped even once we scaled past it. It’s caught vendor issues way before they showed up in any dashboard, and it keeps me honest about what customers actually experience versus what I assume they experience.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
Thirty thousand orders through GroovyGroomsmenGifts.com, but it’s not really the number, it’s what the number represents. That’s 30,000 times a vendor delivered, a customer trusted us with a wedding they only get once, and it worked. I started this in a niche most people would’ve called too small to matter, so watching it get here means more to me than any bigger business milestone would.
Who is your favorite motivational speaker and why?
I don’t really follow motivational speakers. If I’m honest the people who’ve actually moved the needle for me were other small business owners I met at trade shows back in my WeddingReports.com days, guys running operations way bigger than mine who’d still take twenty minutes to answer a question. That kind of thing stuck with me more than any stage talk ever did.
What advice would you give to your younger self and why?
Start smaller than you think you need to. When I launched WeddingReports.com, I wanted to cover the entire wedding industry at once. Took me a while to figure out that going narrow and doing it well beats spreading thin across everything. I’d have saved myself a couple of rough years if I’d trusted that sooner instead of learning it the hard way.
Are you willing to be a mentor? If yes, what is the best way to reach you?
Yes. Reach me through GroomsDay or directly through GroovyGroomsmenGifts.com. I’m most useful to people still figuring out vendor relationships. That’s the part that took me the longest to get right and I can save someone real time there. Here is my direct email where you can reach me out: cbajda@groomsday.com
Just for fun, what is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Chocolate flavor never goes wrong and compliments with all sorts of toppings!