At just 17 years old, Kate Lovelady owns and operates her own business. Forever Kate can be found at 410 Main Street in Hartselle. The teen attends classes at Hartselle High School in the morning, and works in her store in the afternoon.

Lovelady and her mother run the store, with the occasional help of her friends and store neighbors. Lovelady said she began the store a little over a year ago, and began it as a hobby. She said that she and her mom had always hoped it would become bigger, but they never expected it to happen so quickly. “We kind of hoped that it would, but it is hard to imagine it because we were running it out of our basement and our storage room in our basement. There is only so much stuff you can do in there. So it is kind of hard to imagine that just in a year we can get to where we are now,” Lovelady said.

For the Hartselle teen, the moment that the store began to feel like a reality was when she first opened the storefront off Main Street. “Before then it was just four or five or six customers that regularly bought like one thing from each run. That was kind of holding us and it was just a little side hobby. Then around Christmas we had been doing a lot of vendor shows so our inventory had grown form barely one rack to three wracks packed full at a vendor show and we were getting swamped at shows,” says Lovelady,  “Depot Days was also another really big thing for us. We kind of jumped in the deep end with Depot Days because that was the first ever vendor market. We were swamped. Really when we opened this stor front it got crazy at our open house. We had like a 30 minute dressing room wait at our open house. I was blown away. I was like all of these people came to shop with this tiny little thing that started in our basement,”

Even with all of the growth she has already seen, Lovelady said she hopes the store only continues to grow and thrive. “Maybe someday we will get a bigger building if we ever grow to be that big. Hopefully we will. I would love to have a little warehouse or like another part where we could ship things out of, where we can be that big enough to have that,”Lovelady said.

Despite all the hard work running a business and attending high school requires, Lovelady says her favorite thing is to see the store grow. “I like seeing it go from a just a few people regularly buying from us to people we had met at Depot Days and little vendor shows like that who walk in and are like ‘oh my gosh I love this. We have been following y’all since like so and so.’ I have never met them before in my life but they somehow know who I am,” says Lovelady, “So I think that is my favorite part is people coming in the store and people knowing us and following us.”

In addition to operating her own business, Lovelady also gives back to the community. She donates portions of her profit to Feeding Families and to Clothe Our Kids of North Alabama. She also supports a child in the Dominican Republic each month.

Lovelady said the business began due her and her mother shared love for boutique clothing and their desire to make it more accessible to everyone. “So me and my mom love boutique clothing and a lot of times it is really out of price range so we wanted to provide our customers with really cute boutique clothing at affordable prices,” Lovelady said.

Since her mother had some experience working in wholesale, the mother daughter duo first began their business on social media and ran it from their basement. “Then it just kind of grew into something bigger because the people we had added would add their friends and then people that their friends had added would add more, so it eventually grew to be a little bigger than we originally intended it to be,” Lovelady said.

Despite that, Lovelady is continuing her degree at Hartselle High, and is considering a variety of career options for her future. “I kind of have a passion for physical therapy. I am still trying to figure out whether this is for sure it. I really do enjoy this, and I have a really good passion for this and I am really good at being able to pick out what is in style. I can definitely now see how this can grow into something way bigger. I definitely have the drive to make that happen, it is just that I have so many other things that I think are cool too,” Lovelady said.

One thing that she is sure of, is of her goals for the store. “I would like to really grow online sales and just grow online way more. I want to have a huge Facebook group with a really awesome community of people. I just want to be able to provide people with cute clothes that they can actually afford,” Lovelady said.

The latest store information can be found on the Forver Kate Facebook pages. Lovelady runs a normal page for the business as well as a group that she says is more personal. She uses both pages to place orders and keep customers aware of what is happening in the store. Lovelady hopes to only continue to grow the pages. “We just started out as little bitty side hobby and grew into a full store. Hopefully it can continue to grow because I would definitely love to see it become something,” she said.