We were lucky to catch up with Toni O’Dell and Julie Terrazas recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Toni O’Dell and , thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

The mission of Bloom Handmade Market is to provide an experience for our fellow small businesses that they can look back on and appreciate. We want our small businesses that join us to know that they have our 100% support and we’ll work diligently to make our event a success for them. We also want them to know that we see them, the person behind the business. As small business owners ourselves, we know the time, energy, and heart that goes into being successful.

On the flip side, we want our guests that come to our event to enjoy everything that local small businesses have to offer. We want them to get to know the person that made their favorite hand cream or earrings. Having that human connection between the business and the customer is something that large box stores can’t offer. We want them to rally their friends and family to support local small businesses as well.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Bloom Handmade Market was founded in 2019 by Toni O’Dell and Julie Terrazas. The goal was to provide an opportunity to showcase our favorite small businesses and give those businesses a chance to connect with the community and get their names known to more people. We created a one day shopping event to bring everyone together to achieve this goal. We are so proud to see so many people come out and support our small business friends on the day of the event. We also love seeing the support that’s shown on social media whenever we highlight each business.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

We met at a market in 2018 where we were both vendors and “booth neighbors”. Our friendship quickly formed over common interests and of course, working at pop up events and markets in the area. We’ve worked together in business, spent many hours on the phone dreaming and planning and supported each other through hard times. We truly enjoy the community we’ve been blessed with and we both love them fiercely.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

For us our “team” is the small businesses we’re promoting. We have found that a lot of small businesses register for pop ups or markets and the market does very little to promote each individual business. Sure, they may promote the market but they don’t really touch on who will be there. For us, promoting the business is at the forefront. We want each business that’s trusting us with making them successful knows that we’re in their corner. We’ve got their back and we’ll hustle our hearts out to make them shine. We encourage our businesses to like and comment on our posts on Instagram and Facebook and show some love to their fellow makers. We want everyone to feel like one big team and take on the community over competition mindset.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: www.instagram.com/bloomhandmademarket
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/bloomhandmademarket
• Other: Email: bloomhandmademarket@gmail.com

Image Credits
Brittany Paul Photography Doubleside Toffee Simply Tiff’s Fiesta Feet Em’s Clay and Craft Torresita Creations Art & Soul TX Joyful Home Studio AbBees Charcuteries