“Originally, the business was to be a part time thing for Liesl,” Todd recalls. “She thought maybe she’d hire an assistant at some point, but that was about it.”

“Opportunities began to come in and she couldn’t take advantage of them by herself. She was being asked to travel and teach, to write a book and do fabric collections,” Todd says of his wife’s early days at Oliver + S. “She needed a growth path for the business and we had to make a decision — do we want to grow this or keep it an extremely small, part time hobby?”

The couple chose growth.

A former college professor with a PhD in literature, Todd was working at an investment bank after a 10-year stretch in management consulting. Not entirely happy with his current job, Todd decided to quit and come to work for Oliver + S full-time. With their combined skills and work experience, the Gibsons were able to grow the company into a mainstay on the home sewing market.

One of the first things Liesl and Todd considered when discussing Todd’s move to full-time, was whether they could afford it.

Pattern designer Jen Beeman found herself in a similar position when her women’s sewing pattern business, Grainline, began to grow. Beeman began asking her partner, Jon Krohn, to help her during his off-hours. A graphic designer by training with experience in laying out books, Krohn was able to help Beeman create her first print patterns.

“I’d be so stressed about creating stuff for print and he’d take one look at it and say, ‘Oh, this is easy. Let me do it.’ He’d lay it out and call the printer and set it all up. It was great,” Beeman says of Krohn’s contributions.

In May of 2015, Krohn began working for Grainline full-time, taking over all of the graphic design work and managing shipping and distribution — a time-consuming task that Beeman desperately needed help with.

For other creative business owners, bringing their spouse on full-time is a future goal.

Right out of art school, Jordan Perme started making faux taxidermy creatures by carving foam and covering it in felt shapes. She called them Horrible Adorables and took them to a craft show in Philadelphia to see if they might sell. Her husband, Chris Lees, came along to help out.

“For the first show I just did the logistical stuff,” Lees recalls. “I booked the hotel room and helped her pack the car.”

Shoppers loved Perme’s quirky critters and she felt encouraged to continue making them, but cutting the felt shapes that covered each animal was labor intensive. Lees, a mechanical engineer and artist, helped to streamline production in a way that would allow Perme to create a Horrible Adorables creature quickly and efficiently enough to sell in a retail setting.

“It’s a leap of faith,” Lees says. “But we’ve put money aside in savings so that even if we don’t make any profit in 2016 we can still live.”

“I’m a little nervous about having us both home all day,” Perme says. “I think it’s going to be important to be respectful of how each other work.”

Todd Gibson, of Oliver + S, agrees: “Working together will have an impact on your relationship. You’re going to be spending a lot more time with that person. You’re raising kids together, living together and now working together, so any disagreements in any sphere are going to spill over.”

Gibson recommends setting boundaries and deciding when you’ll talk about work and when you’ll leave work behind.

“When Jon works a design job it’s $100 per page,” Beeman explains. “I can’t afford to pay that. But he said, ‘Yes, let’s build this thing together.’ If you hire someone they’re never going to say that.”

It’s also important to think through how you’ll define your spouse’s work status for legal, payroll, and tax purposes; will they be a contractor, an employee, or a partner?

The Gibsons own Oliver + S as an equal partnership while Krohn is an employee of Grainline with Beeman retaining sole ownership of the company.

“He feels like, ‘You built this company. You can own it.’” Beeman explains. “He’s not a person who feels he needs to be in charge. As a graphic designer, he was used to taking assignments from clients. Then again, we don’t really have typical gender roles. Jon does all the grocery shopping and all the cooking for us.”

Permes still has her business registered as a sole proprietorship LLC, but plans to amend that to bring Lees on as an equal partner in the coming year.

The Gibsons have rented their home in New York City to spend this year in Spain with their daughter, an experience that would have likely been impossible if they didn’t own their own business.

Being in business together doesn’t come without risk, though. When both partners’ financial futures are tied to a single business, the stakes are high. Beeman says Krohn helps her relax when she begins to worry about the risks involved.

“Jon tells me, ‘We can always go and get jobs if everything fails,’” she says.

And the Gibsons say the trade-off has been worth it: “Even now, we both make less money than we did when we were working corporate jobs, but it’s really about how you define success. If success means owning a second home and a big boat and two or three cars this wouldn’t be success, but we feel we’ve been able to use this business to escape from working for the man and being tied to an office cubicle in midtown Manhattan. This business gives us the lifestyle we want.”

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