With her bold and colorful jewelry, accessories and clothing sold in more than 2,500 stores and a strong e-commerce platform, Brianna Cannon’s brand is well represented across the U.S. Owning her own brick-and-mortar store, however, was always a key aspiration for her. In November 2022, the now designer and CEO opened her first flagship store, at Preston Park Village in Plano, Texas. “It’s an important experience for our customers to be able to walk in and be fully immersed in our brand,” she explained.

While studying fashion merchandising at Texas Christian University, Cannon had developed a comprehensive business plan as part of an entrepreneurship class. “It included everything from financials to marketing to what you would carry and how you would stock it,” she recalled. After college, she honed her retail skills at prestigious companies like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Neiman Marcus. In 2018, she founded Team RLN and made a name for herself creating game day jewelry for 10 colleges. Then, during COVID, she pivoted to offer a full line of accessories and rebranded the company to the eponymous Brianna Cannon.

In this Q&A with ICSC Small Business Center contributing editor Rebecca Meiser, Cannon shares insights into her origins, the core values that drive her business and aspirations for her company.

How did your company begin?

It was launched in 2019. I had left Neiman Marcus, where I managed the jewelry department, two years before. While I was at Neiman Marcus, I made some great relationships with jewelry designers. When I left, I started doing freelance work for a jewelry designer based out of Los Angeles named Devon Leigh. One day, I went to a TCU football game and saw some cute girls wearing game day earrings that I thought were super fun. I thought: “How great would it be to make them just cooler and better and with gemstones?”

So I said to Devon, “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to do this game day line of jewelry?” and she was like, “Yeah, that would be so cool, but we’d have to get licensing.” That’s important because you can’t use the trademarks without it, so she told me to look into it. I gave her all the information and then she was like “No. Hard pass. That’s so expensive.” But Devon was not into college football like I was. She could not really imagine the potential of the business. I told her: “This is a multibillion dollar industry. I really think it would be successful.” She said I should go and do it instead, but I don’t think she really thought I would.

My husband was really the one who said go for it. He asked: “What do you need?” I told him that I wanted to cut the shapes of all these logos out of metal and that I wanted to set gemstones in them.

He contacted a fraternity brother of his who owns a machine shop. Within about a week, we had samples. We started with 10 licenses, which is kind of a miracle in itself in that we have a brand-new company with no prior history. I mean, that was really wild. We started with only earrings.

That’s a big risk and investment. Did you have a connection with any kind of audience before deciding to buy the licenses and launch?

We launched our company as Team RLN. RLN stands for “red lips and nails.”  It was the name of a blog I had. I thought I was going to be a fashion blogger full-time until I realized that’s really not for me. But I had my blog, and I called my [thousands of] followers Team RLN. When I launched this game day brand, I thought that it would be kind of an extension of my blogger situation.

But you decided to rebrand in 2020, right?

We were being knocked off a lot, so I thought it was a perfect time to rebrand and introduce an actual logo and trademark for our company. Also, COVID really changed the trajectory of our business. Games were not happening, so while the game day industry was on hold, we shifted into more of a fashion direction. We started creating everyday jewelry and accessories and holiday and seasonal products, so it didn’t make sense to call the company Team RLN anymore. A lot of brands are the designer’s name: Ralph Lauren, Kendra Scott, Louis Vuitton. I thought that having the personal connection to me would be better. That way, at market, whenever people would come up and meet me, they would already know my name.

Your accessories are sold at places like Nordstrom and boutiques across the Southeast like The Swank Co. and Jaxe + Grace Boutique. You also have a strong online store. What motivated you to open your own brick-and-mortar store?

It’s an important experience for our customers to be able to walk in and be fully immersed in our brand. We sell our products to probably 2,500 other stores, but we don’t have a big presence in them. We’re just one brand amongst many brands; we wanted people to be able to experience our whole brand.

And to be able to take pictures of our products on display is helpful for social media, of course, and to give other stores an example of how our displays should look.

How did you decide where you wanted to be located?

We were thinking originally that we wanted a warehouse and a retail store all in one, but where I live— the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is one of the most expensive places to be. To find the square footage that is good for retail but also good for warehouse is very difficult. We found a location that would have maybe worked. In hindsight, it was probably too small, but we really wanted it. It was in a historic building in downtown Lewisville. It ended up not working out and I was sad, but I remember saying to my husband that the customers walking around were not necessarily our customers. Then we looked in downtown Plano. It was also a really cool, historic area, but again, the walking-around traffic was a little off from our demographic.

I was feeling down, so my husband said: “If you could have a store anywhere, if money was no object, where would you want your store to be? I said: “If we didn’t have to think about the warehouse component, I’d like to be at [Brixmor’s] Preston Park Village in Plano because that is the most trafficked intersection in our county. It’s our community and our demographic.” So he said: “Let’s go drive over there.” There was a vacant, small boutique space finished pretty nicely that needed very little renovation. It had double doors, like I had envisioned. The place faced Preston Road, which is the busiest road in Collin County. It was like having a billboard on Preston Road. It was perfect. We signed and got a different warehouse five minutes from the store.

If you think about how brands like Kendra Scott operate, they don’t have a warehouse and a retail store in the same place, so it’s not necessary. We were just trying to keep operations easier, but really, it wasn’t needed.

Are you looking to open more stores?

We would love to open more stores if it’s the right location and the right opportunity. There are certain markets that are interesting to us because of our demographics. We love the idea of Nashville. We love the idea of my hometown, Southlake, which is not far but is a very different little pocket in DFW. We both love Fort Worth, although we do have a strong wholesale presence in Fort Worth. I think part of business is being ready for opportunities when they come available, but not putting yourself on such a strict path that you miss them.

Can you share the demographics of your customer base?

We’re very southeastern. Our brand is very saturated in boutiques. In e-com, though, we’re starting to see some of our northern friends loving our brand. We’ve added some more northern universities: Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State. Our whole game day part of our brand is back, and it’s huge. We just became licensed with the NFL. We’re also licensed with the Kentucky Derby. We also make products for companies like Raising Cane’s and Mary Kay. We have a whole licensing business. Then we do our fashion business. Our fashion products definitely appeal to a very southeastern demographic. They’re very colorful, super bright and very bold. I always tell people if you want plain black accessories, go to Amazon. We’re also openly a Christian company. We share our values on our website. Our faith is a big part of who we are as a company. For certain customers, that’s important to them.

Can you talk about how your values drive the business?

It impacts the decisions we make. Our retail store is not open on Sunday, for instance, because I don’t want my team working on Sunday. It means when we interact with customers, we are always keeping [our faith] in mind. At the end of the day, profitability is obviously important — we’d go out of business if you weren’t profitable — but the way that we treat people and the way that we represent Jesus in our interactions is the most important thing to us. [In the same way], I’m never going to create scandalous clothing, I’m never going to create something dark or sinister. It’s always going to be very happy and very light and is a reflection of what is in our hearts.

You’re known for never repeating the same design or print on your products. What led you to make that decision?

My goal is to be a brand that’s collected. I didn’t want people to say: “I’m going to skip [buying something] this year because I’ve already got a Christmas headband or Christmas earrings.” I want them to want this year’s earrings. I want customers to anticipate and collect new pieces. For instance, there are girls [on social media] that have posted pictures of our hair accessories. They have literally 200 headbands. They’re collecting our product, but you can’t collect it if there’s not enough variety. I also think that [limited editions] help for resale purposes. There’s a buy/sell/trade page [for the brand] on Facebook, and some of our headbands are selling there for above retail because you can’t find them.

Where do you want to be in five years? Where do you want to be in 10 years?

When we started our business, we didn’t have any idea where it would be. We didn’t really have any specific goals. We just knew that we wanted it to be successful. That’s how we still feel. We just want to grow it as big and as best as we can, but we don’t necessarily have a dollar amount. We have no investors, no debt and no outside parties involved in our business. Considering that and the rate we’ve grown, we’re very optimistic about what we could do in the future. In business, in general, going from $2 million to $10 million is one of the hardest jumps because it takes so much scaling. We’re in that right now. I’m hoping that we can make wise enough decisions to be able to scale appropriately.

What advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur?

There are a few things every entrepreneur has to possess. No. 1: You have to be your own biggest fan. That sounds crazy, but you have to believe in yourself, almost to an unhealthy degree. You have to be able to look at your product and be like: “This is awesome, despite what everyone says.” There were ladies that saw my product in my very first and second markets ever, and went: “Oh, how funny. Do people wear these?” You have to know that what you’re doing is good and know that not everybody is going to understand it or care about it. If you do not believe in what you’re doing, then it’s going to be real tough.

No. 2: You definitely are going to work more and harder than you would for any other company. Obviously, the upside is greater, but it involves a tremendous amount of sacrifice. There’s a misconception amongst people who don’t own their own company that you just have all this free time and all this flexibility. I heard Elon Musk say — and it was so accurate — that as a business owner, all of the worst problems get funneled to you because those are the things that nobody else can do. So you pawn off all the easy, fun stuff, and then you get to do the things that no one else can do.