That business failed.
Gemma (pictured right) has been willing to share her story here, to encourage other entrepreneurs to keep going in the face of adversity, and to learn from the hard lessons that business can deliver.
Having two very young children means Gemma's already got her hands full. She's young, not yet 20, and ambitious. Before going into business she wisely invested time to learn about it.
She studied Business and Management at college, tooks lots of training from BusinessLink, and researched her potential suppliers. She then launched her fancy dress and clothing websites in late 2009 and waited for the sales to come rolling in.
They didn't. Having spent £5,000 getting the business going Gemma was spending more time uploading information to the site than she was processing customer orders. Something had gone wrong.
Rather than hoping sales would improve she reassessed her plans and did more research. She found that many of her competitors in the fancy dress market also sold party supplies, so she decided to follow their example and ditched the idea of selling fashion clothing.
A couple of months ago Gemma launched two new sites, GD Party Supplies and GD Fancy Dress. This time she's engaged the services of an SEO (search engine optimisation) company to improve their visibility online and the investment is already generating results.
She's also employing a copywriter to create content and blog posts, which help generate more search engine traffic. Articles are also being placed on third-party websites, with links back to her own sites, and these are helping to build her SEO.
Gemma's advice to anyone starting a business is be willing to invest. She admits that the first time around she was afraid of spending money on SEO and copywriting. She tried to do it all herself but didn't have the right skills. Now she's paying specialists to do it she's seeing more traffic to her sites.
She also recommends that entrepreneurs get as much feedback as possible about the quality of their business website, and should not become defensive when they receive criticism. No site will please everyone all of the time, but it's still important to listen to what people say and be willing to accept that much of it is probably right.
Gemma's example is an inspiration to anyone who's been brave enough to set up their own business only to see it fail. She's learned from her mistakes and is bouncing back.
