Regina Ann Stiltner is the owner of Splentique, a lifestyle brand that offers hand-selected clothing, jewelry, and gifts that are relevant yet classic.
Also, the products they sell are quality yet affordable. After being a retailer for 20 years, she followed her passion and started her own brand.
Growing up, Regina has a loving family. Her father is her role model, and she learned a lot of life lessons from him. He told her “you are stamping your name on that job and you should give it your all”. She was brought up in a small town and every other person didn’t appreciate it until later in life. School life was tough mostly because she was teased and bullied for years. But as she grew out of her ‘ugly duckling’ phase, as she calls it, it stopped.
Regina developed an interest in retail from an early age. She used to make clothes for her doll, and sketch pictures of stores, clothes, and models. She began her career on the sales floor of a family-owned retail chain. She then went on to become store manager, district manager, zone learning, and development manager, and finally head of their visual merchandising department. Stiltner made two major moves in the country due to this job and worked for 10-16 hours daily. Regina experienced a life-changing moment while she was in the NICU after giving birth to her son, Gavin. With a lot of time in hand, she started questioning her happiness and priorities and realized she was far removed from her goals. She needed more time for her family, travel less, and to follow her passion for product and marketing.
In 2017, with the help of her family, she launched Splentique, a women’s lifestyle brand that helps the customers to understand and cultivate the style that is uniquely their own. Since its start, the company has supported organizations by in-store shopping programs, boutique pops up shops, online shopping parties, and give away donations. They handpick the organizations and help them in whatever way they can. Not only this, Regina wishes to create a sub-organization to sponsor women entrepreneurs and guide them in the first year of business. She strongly believes in supporting women and wants to do little good for them whilst making them look and feel amazing.
Initially, the sales were not as good as expected. She wanted to get customer feedback and threw a party. Talking about that one idea that worked for her, she says, “We did around $400 that first night in my living room and you would have thought that I made millions. For the first time in my career, the branding was mine, the products were mine, the customers were my friends and family.” She wanted this feeling of shopping with a friend to exist in the hearts of her every customer.
Regina feels that retail isn’t a family-friendly field. Her biggest challenge initially was maintaining a balance between being a single mom and working. She regrets the amount of time she spent working and not focusing on the family. She still sometimes struggles with the same. After 20+ years in retail and working with various brands, she needs to unlearn a few things that aren’t applicable in the present era. She wants to keep a student mentality and be open to learning.
Addressing the budding women entrepreneurs, she says, “Listen, Ladies, life is too short not to lean into your passions. Life is too short not to find ways to give back to others with the humble gifts that you might possess. Life is too short not to feel like your children will understand what you stood for and who you helped along the way. Move forward with your dreams because fear kills more dreams than failure ever will”. She inspires us to never let the mistakes define who we really are and constantly learn from them. Also, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and at the same time be bold enough to take on something new.