The Backstory
Hello! My name is Wendy Litteral, the founder and owner of CreationDepot, LLC. I started CreationDepot somewhere around 1999 when I was graduating high school. (Dating myself a bit there!) Martha Stewart was big and I wanted to be just like her. I LOVED crafts and decorating and decided at the ripe old age of 18 that I was going to open my own online craft sales shop. Trouble is, that was before things like Shopify and Square existed, so I had small PayPal embedded code buttons throughout the site. Looking back, it’s no wonder nothing converted! But still, I was reaching out to bloggers and artists and the business was starting to build, but then it ultimately it got sidelined because people kept asking me to make websites for them. And I mean all.the.time. No one was interested in crafts, they all wanted their own sites!
Being a freelance web designer was a great gig – I was making side money while I went to George Mason University. Soon CreationDepot went from an online art supply store to a website design company. It remained a side business that I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to until 2008 when (like everyone else!) I got let go from a graphic design agency. With a wonderful 3 months severance (it was super generous!), I decided I was going to take that time to build CreationDepot – it’s now or never I told myself. And I did just that.
For the next 5 years, CreationDepot was the face of my freelance work, and I built it up to include huge clients like RE/MAX and the DC Chapter of the Better Business Bureau. I was making around $50k/year while going to school part time (University of Virginia), and things were great. In 2012 I got married to a wonderful man, and 2 seconds later I was pregnant with our daughter. It’s about this time that I panicked and said, “I need a secure job, with better health insurance… and regular paychecks!!,” (freelancing is notoriously a roller-coaster when it comes to paydays), and quickly started working for a website company in downtown D.C., a few blocks from the White House.
Since then I’ve admittedly let CreationDepot float along with its existing customers, doing quality work but not taking on many new clients. That is until about the middle of 2016 when things started to get serious. CreationDepot became trademarked in September of 2016 (CreationDepot™ – woo hoo!), and I started to hire out all the pain points I’ve had in the past. These positions include accounting, developing, an extra designer, a tech guru, and a few other odd jobs. Suddenly the business started running itself, and gathering steam.
I’m proud to say CreationDepot™ has grown to a very reliable team of 5 workers, plus a few contractors to boot. I don’t do very much design work myself anymore, but I do get to manage it and enjoy working directly with the customers – my favorite part! We’re now turning out websites at our fastest rate ever, and seeing faster returns and overall growth.