From Hobby to Leader of the Industry, an American Dream!
Our story..
Dave and I used to ride our sportbikes at the motorcycle racing track and he always wanted decals for his bike so it looked more like a race bike. We could never find the ones he wanted, but a friend of ours had a little hobby cutter (Jan 2007), and he let us borrow it. Because of Dave's background in graphics, he got it working right away, and we started making our own decals. After realizing the potential of the cutter, we bought our own and began selling them to our friends for their bikes, cars, businesses. (small stuff, names, little logos, etc)
Fast forward a year, a friend of mine asked if we made wall decals, and we were like, er what are wall decals? I began experimenting with our material, and turns out, it sticks to the wall too! We started selling our decals on Etsy as Badass Custom Decals, and 2 months later, we created Dali Decals because it was more 'family friendly'. (The name Dali is a combination of both of our names, David and Alicia.) That was summer of 2008. A month later, we were so busy with our Etsy sales, selling wall decals, that I had to quit my job as a high school teacher, and pursue our decal biz full time. Right after I quit teaching, we launched our site, www.dalidecals.com and shortly afterwards, Dave quit his full time job which was mostly web development and programming.
We were working out of our house in Coral Springs, FL at the time, and moved to Asheville, NC for 1 year, thinking we wanted to get out of Florida. NC was nice, but after growing rapidly and learning the hard way about state income taxes there, we made a u-turn and headed back to FL. We decided that you visit NC for vacations, you don't live there!
Sooo, we settled in Jacksonville FL in February 2010 and we just LOVE it here.. We now have about 20 employees in just under 10k square feet in 2 warehouses, and we're ready to expand into a 3rd warehouse space before the end of 2012. Things are good! We love what we do, and we love that we can continue to do this, support ourselves, and all of our employees in the process.
-Alicia
