Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mina Mantor, Jândi Harris Ciatta-mae Stubblefield, Charlene Dunbar. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Mina Mantor, Jândi Harris, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later
There are many factors to starting a business sooner rather than later, like your mindset and lived experiences. We started later in life, but that was the right time for us to start Craft Savvy Market. Running a business is a learning process and we each brought knowledge and experience to the table from our own businesses and professional experiences. You will never be perfectly equipped, but working as business partners does require personal maturity and I’m glad we started when we did versus say five years before, when each of us may have been more hot-headed or less secure. At the time we started, we were also further along in our faith journey which helped us work through the good, bad, and ugly that comes with working as a team. Having a foundation of friendship also helped when friction and conflict arose in our working relationship. We’ve had to learn how to leverage and appreciate our individual strengths and weaknesses when our relationships expanded from personal to business.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Craft Savvy Market emboldens makers to pursue their passion and grow their handmade craft business by creating community and marketplace opportunities. Craft Savvy Market was created by four childhood friends, Ciatta-Mae, Mina, Jandi and Charlene, who love creating and buying handmade items. We met a local coffee shop to discuss how there were hardly any spaces where you could discover new handmade makers and purchase their products in person. We were not event planning experts, but decided to meet the need and hosted our first handmade market in March 2018. As we built relationships with other makers and learned more about common handmade business challenges, we began creating resources like the Resilient Conference to help support makers. We have hosted eight markets, two marketing conferences and created a thriving community of 1000+ makers that are served through our blog, Facebook group, newsletter and social media content. In July 2022, we launched the Handmade Business Diary podcast to share our stories of the struggles and triumphs of being handmade business owners. We are excited to share our experiences along with the resources and learnings that we are using to grow our own businesses and have had a great response so far. If you are a maker looking for a supportive and resourceful community, Craft Savvy Market is here for you.
Learning and unlearning, are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
We had to unlearn the idea that being successful means working without resting and trying to do everything. We started in July 2017 and launched our first market in March 2018. For the first few years of our business we would meet every Tuesday and rarely take time off for vacation or rest. We prioritized rest a few years ago and now take off a few weeks in December. We are also moving towards meeting only three times per month with the goal of allowing space for rest and spending more time with our families. We also unlearned doing everything at once. At our very first market, all four founders taught a creative class and were vendors at the market….in addition to opening a market spaces for vendors! We have since walked away from doing everything at once to having a more focused approach. We have learned that it is more impactful to get focused on a few areas and see results than to do multiple things but not do any of them well.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Like many others, our business had to pivot when the pandemic hit the world in 2020. We had a handmade market planned for that spring that we had to cancel. We also knew that we would have to make some tough decisions because a huge part of our business model at that time was based on bringing customers and handmade businesses together for a curated shopping experience. With local government and venue restrictions, we had to pivot and decide how our business would operate. We tried an online shopping experience that taught us a great deal. We soon learned that the online market experience was not exactly what we desired. We decided to shift the focus of Craft Savvy Market from being primarily a business that provided shopping experiences to including a community and resources for handmade businesses. In early 2021, we hosted our first virtual makers conference to help provide makers with information and education to run a successful handmade business. While the pivot was one of necessity, it forced us to expand our vision of the business and examine different ways we could serve our audience.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.craftsavvymarket.com
- Instagram: @craftsavvymarket
- Facebook: @craftsavvymarket
Image Credits
Sangima Lee