We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gabrielle Bage and Ebony Grant. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gabrielle, Ebony below.

Gabrielle and Ebony, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Put simply- to be successful, you have to continuously work hard. Success doesn’t happen overnight, and if you don’t enjoy or have love for what you are doing, then eventually it is going to get old and you won’t be able to keep pushing when times are tough. During Covid, our sales dropped as our business relies primarily on sales in person at festivals and gem shows, and with lockdowns and the fear of catching or spreading covid, these in-person events declined in attendance. We knew that this wasn’t going to last forever, but it definitely felt like it at the time. Fortunately, we love what we do and had no problem making the best of the situation and started to slowly grow our online presence. Finding something you are passionate about and love doing is important when starting a business- when “work” doesn’t feel like “work” you know that you have done something great and it is so rewarding. Meeting new people that love what we love or even teaching people about what we love is something we will never get tired of, and we know that if we continue putting our all into our business, then our success will only continue to flourish.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are Gabrielle and Ebony, relatively new business owners in the rock, mineral, and fossil world. We started our company, Down 2 Earth Crystals & More LLC, in January of 2021 after years of collecting minerals ourselves. We were both in college at the time of our start, so managing a new business with the workload of school was tough, but it was so worth it! We started with going to local gems shows and talking with dealers that have been in the industry for many years to gain some insight on what this job entails and to learn and absorb as much information as we could. We truly dove in to our business head first- we knew that if we gave it our all it would eventually work out how we hoped it would. Almost three years later, we surpassed all of our expectations entirely, and fall more in love with what we do everyday. We love meeting new people, building relationships with existing customers, educating people on the beautiful treasures from our Earth, and the constant learning that comes with this industry as new minerals and information are found. We want our customers and supporters to know that we appreciate everything they do to allow us to continue pursuing our dream- wether it is a sale, a like or post on social media, or just words of encouragement. We thank you greatly!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

In the rock and mineral industry (and probably most industries), integrity and consistency is the best way to build your reputation. We maintain our integrity by being genuine people who care about others and are not ever trying to take advantage of anyone. We make sure to help educate people when we are asked and never give false information to try to get a sale. Before we started our business and were buying for our personal collection, some people would give misinformation to try and make an item out to be natural when it is actually artificial, or to be better or more rare than it really is, and that is something that we have always remembered and never wanted to do ourselves. Maintaining consistency is also important as that shows customers they can always count on you. To uphold this, we have kept our margins the same as when we first started our business, and would never change that just because our business has grown. We also tell customers that they can always reach out to us if they have questions about anything, and we always respond with helpful information very quickly. It is important that if you say you are going to do something to actually do it, and that will gain respect from others and allow your business’ reputation to have integrity and consistency.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We chose to use Etsy as our online shop because we knew that if we started our own website, we would be solely responsible for promoting it. Since we started our business while we were in college, we did not have a lot of time to grow our online presence through social media. We chose to focus on in-person events such as festivals and gem shows on weekends, and allow Etsy to promote our business online. Etsy has worked well for us and we would recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a large social media following that would allow them to have traffic on their own website. However, it is important to note that Etsy does have a lot of fees that should be taken into account when deciding what route you want to use for your online shop. Now that we have graduated college and have a little more free time, we plan to put more work into growing our social medias so that we will be able to move away from Etsy in a couple years.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Down2EarthCrystalCo
• Instagram: @down2earthcrystals
• Facebook: Down 2 Earth Crystals & More
• Email: [email protected]