Say yes quickly: Local business woman lives her dream

Julie Monroy, the U.S. operations manager for Swizz Style, a Switzerland-based company, spends her days in a small office in downtown Dover managing overall operations throughout the country and connecting with such corporations as Target, Costco and Williams-Sonoma. Swizz Style is a privately held distributor focused on streamlining the award-winning household appliances designed by Stradler Form. As she formed a picture of her life, Monroy would have never dreamt she would be leading the way in growing a cutting-edge enterprise, traveling the world, and, even still, raising her family in the safe and secure borders of a small town. The shy girl she once was, a Uhrichsville native, learned along the way to say yes quickly to her loftiest dreams. Monroy’s only desire as a junior in high school was to attend school and be with her friends. Seeing within her hidden potential, Monroy’s mother nudged her into attending Buckeye Career Center’s medical and legal secretary program as a way to gain professional experience before transitioning into college. She soon discovered a passion for business management. “Management became my goal, my dream, and it is what I started setting my sights toward,” Monroy said. She was accepted into Kent State University. When most students were focused on figuring out where to find the best deal on textbooks and scouting out the locations of scheduled classes, Monroy was on the hunt for a resume-building employment opportunity that could get her through school. She started and ended her search at the Kent State Career Services Center, who hired her on the spot. While working at career fairs was the norm for Monroy during her time at the Career Services Center, she would not have guessed how this student job would lead to an opportunity that would change the course of her life forever. What seemed like just another informational meeting, this time with a recruiter from the Disney College Internship Program, sparked an interest for Monroy. “I was thinking they wouldn’t want me,” she said. Receiving encouragement from her boss, Monroy applied anyway to take a sabbatical from school to work as an intern for six months at Walt Disney World. “On my 21st birthday, I got the letter that I was accepted, and it totally changed my life.” Monroy said. Over the course of the next year, she worked as a “merchantainer” in Expo Hall, creating magical moments for tourists wandering the grounds. When her internship was through, Kodak offered her a permanent permission at the park. The overall experience transformed Monroy. She said, “I went from thinking kind of small — that I would just come back home and do something, kind of normal — to thinking maybe I can do something really big and think outside of the box.” She immediately applied to transfer to the three closest universities to Disney World. Monroy was accepted to the University of Tampa, and without even a visit prior to her first day on campus, earned her degree there. Monroy’s journey is filled with much of the same matter as any good journey: success, hard work, heartbreak and obstacles. Monroy openly admits that she would not have been able to take such great risks without the love and support of her husband and her mother. “When facing all those steps in life where you are building up to that next big transition, where you’re not really sure if it is going to happen, I always knew I could do it because I always knew my mom would be right there to catch me if I fell,” she said. Obstacles and hardships rerouted Monroy, her husband, and her first child back to Ohio where, eventually, Monroy took one more leap. She answered a Craig’s List ad. This one-sentence ad opened the door to living out her biggest dream yet. Monroy said, “There’s always that little voice in your head saying you can’t do it, but nothing is impossible. God is so big. … Think bigger than where your comfort zone is and see what happens.”