Rain Shadow LLC

For our Online Retail Store division, our goal is to provide high quality, affordable products to improve and enhance our customers’ and our customers’ pets’ lives.

For our Website Creation division, our goal is to provide high quality, affordable websites for small businesses everywhere.

Across both divisions we strive for the best customer service you can find online and offline.

What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your company):

Rain Shadow LLC was founded in 2001. On our Pet Supply site, we sell healthy pet foods, herbal pet remedies, and other high quality pet products, such as carriers, life jackets, backpacks, exercise pens, crates, toys, and much more. On our gardening site, we sell beautiful, high quality garden fountains, statues, bird feeders, bird baths, outdoor furniture, stepping stones, wishing wells, and many other gardening delights. In our Online Art Gallery, we sell gorgeous art from Colorado artists, from one of a kind pottery to photography to prints. On all of our stores we strive for high quality products at affordable prices, and we’re always looking for new products to add.

In our Website Creation division, we strive to provide the lowest possible prices for high quality websites.

Have you always wanted to run your own business? What were some of your previous jobs / companies?

I’ve wanted to run my own business for a long time now. I’ve been a software design engineer for most of my life, working for several large corporations (TI, IBM, HP) and also one small company. I’ve seen the spectrum of great, average, and poor management, mostly toward the poor side. I’ve had enough.

My online businesses will succeed and I will break away from the shackles of Corporate America once and for all.

Have you got any qualifications? Please tell us about yourself academically?

I graduated with a BSES with an option in Computer Science from the University of South Florida in 1983.

I graduated with an MS in Computer Science from the University of Houston at Clear Lake City in 1992. I believe my degrees in Computer Science and my experience as a software design engineer has set given me the background and confidence to be a great website designer.

How / when did the idea of your website / company come about?

When my manager, in all of her vast wisdom, advised everyone in her group to look around for alternative ways of making a living, I did just that. I responded to a spam email which introduced me to the drop-shipping concept. I do not recommend nor will I in the future respond to spam emails, but I’m glad I responded to this one. It was an expensive learning experience, and now I know there were much less expensive routes to take. The company I worked with asked me about my passion – what makes me happy? My answer: my cat Abigail. So CatAbbey.com was born, but I found myself offering products not just for cats, so I changed the name to PetAbbey.com. I wanted to diversify, so I worked with a second company to setup RainShadowGardens.com and searched for top-notch, high quality gardening products to offer our customers. Then I worked with several local artists and came up with the concept of our Colorado Online Art Gallery, offering the artists a no-monthly-fee option for displaying their beautiful art online.

If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice when starting up a business, what would it be?

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