Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chelsea Crocker. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Chelsea, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Hear & Now was honestly born out of an identity crisis. I taught ELA for three years before starting my business. I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in first grade – it’s what my degrees are in and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Walking away from the profession I thought I would retire in was a really tough decision, but the environment was unhealthy and I couldn’t in good conscience put myself through it anymore. I left in May 2021.

I purchased my first pair of acrylic earrings not long before the start of my third year of teaching – a clear pair of ampersands with a gold mirror post from a company called Sleepy Mountain. To say I was obsessed with them is an understatement. It’s one of the only pieces of jewelry I owned that really made me feel like myself when I wore them.

Jump forward to November 2021, in the midst of an identity crisis, I was sitting on my couch wondering how the ampersand earrings were made. I loved how authentically myself I felt when I wore them, despite not knowing where my life was going career wise, and being able to share that feeling with others is an idea that got me really excited. After a few days of Google searching, I discovered it was completely doable at home with the right equipment, so I opened a business credit card with 0% interest for the first year and bought a laser cutter at the end of the month.

I landed on the name Hear & Now since the ampersand earrings are what inspired this idea in the first place, and I wanted to pay tribute to them with my brand name in some way.

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.

My name is Chelsea, and I’m a Louisiana native living in the Houston area with my husband, our son, and our two rescues. After teaching for three years, I left the classroom in search of a creative outlet with purpose. Hear & Now exists to create pieces that make you feel like your authentic self, and it was also important to me that whatever I chose to do would allow me to give back to my community. I donate a portion of every sale to the Montgomery County Women’s Center, and since opening in March 2022, we’ve donated over $2,000.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

In the beginning I naively assumed sending traffic to my website would be easy because of platforms like Instagram and Facebook. I quickly learned majority of my sales and early growth would come from in person market events. Participating in markets is a lot of fun because I love interacting with customers and building relationships with them. I ended up doing almost 40 in 2022. That being said, my husband and I welcomed our son in March 2023, and I realized I needed to figure out other revenue streams that didn’t require me to sell face to face every weekend. My plan is to focus growing my wholesale accounts in 2024.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

I make all of my pieces in my studio at home using a Glowforge. I didn’t know anything about laser cutters when I was getting started, so before my first launch I took a few months to experiment with different settings and materials. There were a lot of learning curves, especially when it came to finding the right settings for each individual sheet of acrylic – making sure the material wasn’t getting too hot, making sure the material was cutting all the way through, making sure the engravings were smooth. It took a while to figure out the logistics of laser cutting, but now that I’ve got all my settings saved in the Glowforge software, the most important task for avoiding wonky cuts is making sure the laser is cleaned regularly.

Contact Info:

• Website: shophearandnow.com
• Instagram: @shophearandnow
• Facebook: @shophearandnow

Image Credits
Cover Photo: Maddy Fanning