Laguna Beach brothers featuring local icons in Christmas ornaments
A look around their Laguna Beach home is all anyone needs to know about how much Christmastime means to the Collins family.
In the living room, a tree standing 15 feet tall is strewn with lights and ornaments, dominating the front-window display of their historic home.
Over the years, Clark and Greg Collins have seen their sons help decorate the tree during the holidays, and the parents have shared the stories behind the ornaments.
For the past couple of years, Jackson, 16, and Sawyer, 13, a sophomore and an eighth-grader at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, have added to the stories represented on the tree.
Jackson and Sawyer launched Iconic Ornaments in October 2021. The kids have thrown themselves into the entrepreneurial endeavor after experiencing more common childhood ventures such as hosting lemonade stands or selling popsicles on Victoria Beach.
Iconic Ornaments features a couple of ornaments befitting of the name, as Main Beach lifeguard tower and the Laguna Beach trolley have been the subject of their creations.
“We’ve always wanted to do a business venture, and our parents have pushed us to be entrepreneurs, but this is our first venture that made it past the drawing board, per se,” Jackson said. “The inspiration behind it is we have a leaning tower of Pisa ornament up on the tree from Italy.
“We like it a lot. It’s hand-blown glass, like our ornaments, and it has the same kind of pearlescent finish as the lifeguard tower.”
To create the lifeguard tower ornament, the kids started with a paper model before taking a CAD (computer-aided design) drawing to determine the exact dimensions. They were assisted by Keith Lee, a draftsman in town who Clark Collins has worked with on real estate projects.
Fourteen months after their start date, the brothers have sold more than 3,400 ornaments. They have managed it through a titular website and via community vendors that carry their product.
Their ornaments can be found at Bushard’s Pharmacy, Good Together House, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach Books, all in Laguna Beach, and Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar.
The business had immediate support from Laguna Beach residents, Jackson said. The brothers had a booth at Hospitality Night on Dec. 2, allowing them to introduce themselves to more of the community.
“The first day we launched, we had Bushard’s Pharmacy reach out to us and ask if they could carry our lifeguard tower ornament,” Jackson recalled. “That was a huge confidence booster for us because we saw that we had a product that would sell to a retailer, one of the most prominent, older retailers in town, a very established store downtown in the middle of Laguna.
“That support helped us a lot with confidence, and then also, we had many orders the first day, so our first week was pretty good for having a new business that was untested.”
The brothers have indicated that more ornaments may be on the way, and they have considered expanding their range of subjects to Newport Beach and San Juan Capistrano.
“It was really overwhelming at the start, but then I started to get a hang of packing all the ornaments, checking emails every day, and just overall running a business,” Sawyer said. “It’s just been such a great learning experience. In these two years, I’ve learned a lot about business and how to run one.”
One of the lessons their parents had hoped could be learned through the business is the idea of giving back to the community.
“That’s a big part of the philosophy,” Clark Collins said. “If you’re making money, you need to be supporting something in your local community, so figure out what that’s going to be, and figure out a way to give back. … They picked the Pacific Marine Mammal Center. They had both been there since they were kids, and so they give a percentage of every sale to the PMMC.”
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