PLUGGED IN: Launched in a college dorm room, Simple & Sentimental uses the power of the internet to energize continued growth and expand its international customer base.

• Position: CASE STUDY: DIGITAL MARKETING

Taylor Walden was an East Carolina University freshman in 2016, when she began dabbling in calligraphy. She used the art form to create bookmarks, offering them for free from a basket outside her seventh-floor room in Greene Residence Hall. "I thought, maybe people online would like [bookmarks], too, so I set up an Etsy shop," she says. "And no one bought them. It was a saturated market."

Walden segued to prints then stickers, which she created with white paper, a Sharpie and equipment stored in her dorm room's closet--$300 worth of supplies. She had 500 sales on Etsy and was selling inventory outside ECU's student store by the end of her freshman year. Her Etsy sales hit $9,000 in July 2017. "Word got out around campus and on Facebook groups," she says. "I'm a real advocate for Facebook groups. There's a group for everything. People would DM me, but Etsy is what pushed it forward."

Walden has turned her hobby into Simple & Sentimental, a growing online business. Its expansive collection of customized gifts, personalized seasonal decorations, manufacturing and screen-printing services, along with a blog, recipes and brand ambassador program, are a click away. Her business journey from dorm room to warehouse-office building in Ayden has taught her how to make better financial decisions, such as buying sticker vinyl from a less-expensive supplier rather than Amazon and expanding her inventory to include bridesmaid gift boxes. And each step has been wired to digital marketing--website, Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, Amazon and search engine optimization.

Walden says social media is essential, but it's not everything. "The most important thing for e-commerce is search engine optimization," she says. "That's what pays dividends for years. I find that my return is so much better on SEO than on social media. And it's free, for the most part. You learn how to type in the right words, and instead of paying for ads on social media, you find the business and things like Etsy and Amazon come up. And I'm working on getting us some other platforms. It's so much more than Facebook and Instagram. We rely on the internet to save money. It's vital for e-commerce."

Simple & Sentimental's revenue quadrupled from 2017 to 2018. Walden has never borrowed money for her business, instead reinvesting its profits. "All the money was self-generated, and the initial sales of the bridesmaid boxes was what pushed me to make it a business," she says. "I had the Facebook and...