The Workroom My Mother Started Was Invisible to Everyone Under Fifty

The regulars were getting old, and so was I

I inherited a curtain and upholstery workroom from my mother, in a light industrial part of Johannesburg, the kind of place you only find if someone tells you it is there.

For thirty years that was enough. My mother built the business on word of mouth, one satisfied woman telling another over tea, and when I took it over I ran it the same way. We had a book of regulars, actual names in an actual book, women who had used us for decades and sent their daughters and their neighbours. I knew their houses. I knew which one liked a heavy lining and which one changed her lounge every second winter.

The problem, which crept up on me so slowly I did not see it as a problem, was that my regulars were getting old. Some were moving into smaller places with fewer windows. Some had passed away, and I had gone to more than one funeral of a woman whose curtains I had made three times over. And their daughters, the ones who were supposed to keep the chain going, were not phoning.

The quiet that scared me

There is a particular silence that frightens a small business owner, and it is the silence of a phone that used to ring.

For years I did not have to think about where work came from. It came. Then it came less. Then there were weeks, real weeks, where the workroom was too quiet, where my two seamstresses looked at me over the machines with a question in their eyes that I did not have an answer to.

I told myself it was the economy. I told myself people were spending less on their homes. Some of that was true. But the harder truth, the one I avoided, was that a whole generation of women who might have wanted beautiful curtains had no way of finding me. They did not ask their mothers for a recommendation. They asked their phones. And to their phones, I did not exist.

The wedding that showed me the gap

The moment it became undeniable was a young woman who came in, sent by her grandmother, one of my oldest regulars.

She was lovely, newly married, doing up her first proper home, exactly the kind of customer I needed a hundred of. And while she was paging through my fabric samples she said, without meaning anything by it, "I tried to look you up first, you know, to see your work, and I couldn't find anything. My gran had to write your address on a piece of paper."

She was not being unkind. She was being honest, in the way young people are. And it landed on me like cold water, because if her grandmother had not physically written my address on paper, this perfect customer would never have found me at all. How many others had tried to look me up, found nothing, and simply moved on to someone they could see?

Admitting I was out of my depth

I am good at many things. I can look at a bare window and see the finished room. I can match a thread by eye. I cannot, it turns out, do anything at all on a computer beyond email and the occasional invoice.

I tried, for a while, to fix it myself, because I am stubborn and I did not want to spend money I was increasingly not making. I made a page on a social site and posted a few blurry photos of curtains and got three likes, two of them from my seamstresses. I understood none of it. The words people used, the whole machinery of how a stranger with a house full of bare windows might end up standing in my workroom, was completely foreign to me.

Eventually my son, who lives overseas and worries about me, said gently over a video call, "Ma, you would not sew your own filling for a tooth. Why are you trying to do this yourself?"

Getting help, and being careful about it

So I did the thing I had been avoiding, which was to ask for help from people who actually knew how any of this worked.

I was cautious. I had heard the stories, everyone has, of small businesses paying a fortune to a slick operator and getting nothing but excuses. I did not want a salesman. I wanted someone who would treat my little workroom as seriously as they would treat a big company. I spoke to a couple of people, and I asked a lot of blunt questions, the kind my mother would have asked, and eventually I sat across a table from a digital marketing agency who did not talk down to me, which was the first thing that mattered.

What reassured me was not the promises, because everyone promises. It was that they explained things in plain language, and they were honest about what would take time. They walked me through what an SEO agency actually does, this slow work of making a business findable when someone types curtains or upholstery into a search, and they did not pretend it would happen overnight. I did not fully understand all of it, and I said so, and they did not make me feel stupid for asking.

The small proofs

I will be honest about the promotion, because that young bride taught me to be honest. I am not going to sit here and tell you it was magic. It was not. It was slow, and there were months where I wondered if I had wasted my money, and I said as much, more than once, probably too sharply.

But the phone started ringing again. Not in a flood. In a trickle at first, then more. Strangers. Young women doing up first homes. A man furnishing a guesthouse. People who, when I asked how they had found me, said they had searched and I had come up, which two years earlier had been impossible.

I did notice, somewhere in the paperwork, that the firm helping me was a Google Premier Partner, which meant nothing to me at the time and which my son told me was actually a real standard and not just words on a wall. I mention it only because it was one of the small things that made me trust I was not dealing with a fly-by-night.

The book, and the phone

I still keep the book. My mother's book, with names in it going back before I was born, some of them crossed out now because those women are gone.

But next to the book there is now a phone that rings with names I do not know yet, and that is the difference between a business that is quietly dying and one that has a future. My two seamstresses are busy again. I have taken on a third, a young woman who is faster than all of us and who, when a customer comes in, always asks first, "How did you find us?"

Most of them found me on a screen now, not on a piece of paper in a grandmother's handwriting. My mother would have found that baffling. But she would have understood the important part perfectly, because it is the same thing she built the whole workroom on, thirty years ago, one satisfied woman at a time. It is just that now the tea and the word of mouth happen somewhere I cannot see, and I have finally, at this late stage, learned to trust the people who can.