Des Moines Parent Spotlight: Lindsey Foss of Real Deals

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Des Moines Parent Spotlight: Lindsey Foss of Real Deals

If you live anywhere around the metro, it’s a safe bet you’ve heard of Real Deals – a one-stop shop for trendy home décor and clothing at a great price. 

And I’ll bet you’ve seen Lindsey Foss, too. She’s the owner and friendly face you see when you walk in the doors and on Facebook Live shopping events. 

Real Deals opened its Uptown Ankeny storefront back in 2018, and in the years since, it’s grown exponentially. But Lindsey and her team have faced a number of challenges along the way, too. Namely a pandemic. 

We caught up with Lindsey – mom of two with one more on the way! – to hear more about the business and how she manages a full plate. 

Give us a little background on yourself. 

My husband, Jared, and I are originally from Northeast Iowa, and we both attended Iowa State and wanted to settle in an area outside of the metro with the same small-town feel. 

I have a background in journalism and PR and actually worked in agriculture prior to opening up Real Deals, but I always joke that I have a degree in HGTV. I have always had so much interest in home decor and shopping, small businesses, and boutiques, and I wanted to find a way to merge those things together. 

Once we had kids – Maddox is five and Rory is three [and one on the way!] – we really were trying to figure out how we wanted to work with kids and what we wanted that to look like. And we decided to open our own business. 

We opened Real Deals in 2018, and the day that we signed the franchise agreement was the same day that we closed on our current location in Uptown Ankeny, the same day I quit my job and the same day I found out I was expecting. 

It was a huge leap of faith. 

We thought, hopefully, this works out and hopefully we’re making all the right moves for this growing family. And little did we know the whirlwinds that we would experience over the next few years. 

But with that, our shop was born, our daughter was born and we’ve just been trying to navigate what that looks like being business owners and parents ever since. 

It seems like you’ve got a lot going on! How do you manage it all? 

I have a very wonderful team to help me. So we’re definitely not doing it all. And the pandemic taught us a lot of things about running a business. We were only a year or so into being business owners when the pandemic hit, so it felt like we were just starting to get our legs under us and figuring out how to run a business. Then a worldwide pandemic comes through and totally changes our mindset. 

The biggest thing for me, and part of why I wanted to open a shop in the first place, is just that connection with customers. We really wanted to be part of the community, and we suddenly lost our ability to connect with these customers who had turned into friends. And so for us, the biggest focus has always been, how do we continue to stay relevant to our customers? How do we continue to connect with our customers and meet them where they are? We started doing online shopping and Facebook live shopping and really pivoted our business model just because that’s how we could still stay in touch with our customers. 

Through that, I feel like my role has shifted, and I’ve found that the hat I wear best is just connecting with our customers. We’ve really built up an incredible team who can help with everything else, and they are able to assist with setting displays and checking out customers. And if I can continue to be the one to make those relationships, I feel like that’s the most beneficial. 

Along those lines, what’s your favorite part of being a small business owner?

I love being able to flex my creative brain by resetting the shop every week. The novelty with being open just Thursdays through Saturdays is that it gives us an opportunity to reset the store. It’s a new experience every week, and that’s our niche. When we started, we figured we could always add more days of the week, but it would be harder to take them away. And especially because our family was just growing, we didn’t know what that looked like. 

I love the challenge and the opportunity each week to try to reinvent the space in some way, and a lot of that is driven by customer feedback. And I think it’s just the people, too, who I have the pleasure of working with. We call them retail therapists.

What are some of your favorite things to do with your kiddos around the metro? 

We love to take advantage of the trails by our house and get out for walks and scooter rides and discover new parks. I think that another blessing of shutting down and slowing down in some way was that we were able to discover new parks all around the Des Moines area and try something new. 

They are also water kiddos, so we enjoy boating. Being around our neighborhood and other kiddos is so fun for them. And they’re at the ages where they think Adventureland is Disney World, so we’re going to ride that out as long as we possibly can. We also love Jester Park. They love to be outside. They keep us busy.

What’s your ideal date night?

I think absolutely nothing. I think we like to sit in silence. Jared’s relief is golfing. I’m very good at driving the golf cart. And we enjoy just being active together, too, going out for runs or walks and trying new restaurants. Date nights definitely look different these days. Sometimes our dates are to order takeout and eat it on the back of his truck during the middle of the workday. And we chalk it up as our date night 

I hate to keep bringing things back to the pandemic, but that’s been so much of owning our business. But when the pandemic first started, we made a conscious effort to do takeout. And at first, we thought it was going to be like two weeks, so we wanted to support a different local business every day with some sort of takeout. When it looked like it was going to stick around a little bit longer than two weeks, we started Takeout Tuesdays. And so whoever was working at the shop would just try a different restaurant on Tuesdays. So that’s kind of become our thing to have a little day date with takeout from a local place every Tuesday. 

What’s your number one parenting tip?

I feel like I’ve learned so much from other parents, and I find that I look at the kiddos they’re raising and those who are raising kind, respectful kids. I try to align myself with those parents and almost ask them to be mentors as we’re navigating the challenges of having little kiddos. I want to be setting the foundation for them to grow up, to be kind and inclusive. So I think my biggest tip for my kids is something I want to follow for myself, too. And it’s that you can be a product of your surroundings, and we want to make sure they cast a wide net and are inclusive to everybody. And I try to do the same as a parent to just align with others who I respect their parenting styles and are proud of the kiddos that they’re raising. 

I don’t feel like I’m an expert by any means. We’re faking it till we make it.

And I think that from the business owner side of it, once we kind of let go of this expectation of needing to be all things to everyone all the time and to just take a deep breath and realize that, you know what, it’s not going to be black and white. There’s a lot of gray area in parenting and in our work, too. So, let’s just blend it all together and embrace it.

Follow Her:

Website: https://ankenyrealdeals.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/realdealsankeny/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realdealsankeny/

Lindsey Giardino

Lindsey Giardino

Lindsey Giardino is a freelance writer based in the Des Moines metro. She's also a new mom and learning as she goes. When she's not working on her business or watching her little guy explore this big new world, she loves to cook, read and enjoy the outdoors.

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