Louisa Jane, Inc., Tremont, Illinois

Janet Rocke grew up in Tremont, Illinois, in a home of “diy’ers” – that is, they did everything themselves. Janet’s dad had a woodshop and Janet spent hours in there working alongside her father. Janet remembers going to junk stores with mom (literally). They would go junking and garage-saling, and then turn around and make the old junk, new. Her grandparents also had a strong influence on Janet and her siblings – whenever they went to their grandparents, they were either helping their grandpa do woodworking or helping their grandma sew. All the kids wanted their own toolbox – even Janet and Brenda, Janet’s sister. Drills, screwdrivers, hammers, you name it. To this day, Janet has two or three in her purse at any given time – cause that’s just how it rolls.

Janet’s dream job was to be a designer and was continually talked out of it because design jobs happened in big cities. In high school Janet worked at Caterpillar writing service manuals for tractors, and in college, got hired on full-time to draw floor plans for all the distribution centers world-wide. Meanwhile, she worked at local flower shop, rearranging flowers. Both the flowers and the time spent drawing floor plans once again sparked her love for design. When her boss at Caterpillar got engaged, she joked with him and offered to do his flowers for the wedding. He actually took her seriously, and she ended up not only doing the flowers for his wedding, but two of her friends’ weddings soon after. She was offered a partnership at the flower shop, quit college and her job at Caterpillar, and bought into the flower shop.

One month later, her dad died, and Janet experienced a whole new life change. She was partners in the flower shop from 2000 to 2004, and then sold her part to go into freelance design – furniture and custom bedding. The flower shop called her to come back and work after they had expanded to Morton, IL, and she came back to work for two years. In the same building as the flower shop, she met a couple right next door who worked for a company who designed kitchens and baths. Janet basically moved down the hall and worked for them for seven years. Having had no prior experience of designing kitchens except her love for cooking, she winged it and ended up loving it.

Five years later, she went through her dad’s woodshop and tools, and renewed by her findings, started painting furniture for her own house on the side. When her friends saw the furniture, she had “made new”, they asked her why she wasn’t selling furniture! Soon after, Janet and her friend Dawn, were driving around town and saw a “For rent” sign on a warehouse, called the number, and rented it to get all of her furniture and tools out of her garage. By chance, the warehouse already had a paint booth in it!

At a leap of faith, she quit her design job at the end of 2014 and decided to start Louisa Jane! Janet and Dawn found old furniture, refurbished it, and set the date for their first tent sale – November 2015, in the parking lot of their warehouse. God was good, and the tent sale exploded – in one day they sold all of their inventory. In June of 2016, they had their second tent sale, and soon after Darrel and Brenda Ehnle, Janet’s sister, joined the LJ team. They decided to be ambitious and host a tent sale every month for a year, and each month sold out completely and had to scramble to figure out the next month’s sale. LJ home design began in the middle of all of this, and Dawn got married and left the team. Everything was happening at once, and then a photographer who had her studio in Tremont, asked Janet if Louisa Jane wanted her studio space. Janet gladly took her up on her offer, and Louisa Jane opened the studio in April of 2017. They had already inquired the office across the street from the studio in January of 2016, and started to build the kitchen and bath show room in the office in 2017 as well. Today, Louisa Jane has their warehouse location, office location, and studio location all in Tremont, and the design business continues to grow under big dreams and lots of prayers.