We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ashleigh Becker a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ashleigh, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

Sela Designs uses 100% of profit to care for orphans, stop human trafficking and break the cycles of generational poverty through job creation. To date, we’ve given over $200k to this mission.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I started Sela Designs, an ethical jewelry company, at my kitchen table during my kids’ nap time. My goal was to not only make and sell jewelry, but to bring other women on mission with me. I wanted to provide a product that would allow everyday women to make an impact with their purchasing power. A $20 purchase had the potential to make a huge impact if we all worked together.

In the beginning, I personally made every single piece of jewelry we sold. Now we have a team of people who work in-house as well as artisans in Kenya and Southeast Asia would make Sela jewelry. We’ve added graphic t-shirts and sweatshirts to our product line and have plans to add more products later this year.

As a community, we’ve been able to do incredible things. We’ve purchased a small vehicle for a children’s home in Ethiopia, built a well in Malawi, funded many sex trafficking rescues & aftercare, as well as providing jobs for artisans and women coming out of human trafficking. We’ve given over $200k to this work in the last 6 years.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Sela Designs has been bootstrapped from the beginning! To date, we’ve received less than $10k in outside funding. While I’m proud of building something from nothing and being completely debt free, we are hoping to do more fundraising this year and bring more people into our mission.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

During the pandemic I had to be very strategic right from the start. We were already an online business and used social media to organically grow our community. In the late Spring of 2020 I learned that many big companies were dropping their Ad spend on Meta. I quickly pivoted our strategy from organic to paid social, hired an ads manager, and was able to achieve great return on our marketing efforts.

The ability to see the opportunity and take the risk set us up for tremendous growth in 2020 and 2021. We have since gone back to organic marketing on social media, but that year of running ad campaigns was huge for our growth. I’m always looking for more opportunities like that to grow Sela Designs.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://seladesigns.com
• Instagram: @seladesigns
• Facebook: @seladesigns