We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jenifer Martinez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jenifer, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
There’s this prevailing idea today that people are wasting away at the daily grind. I wholeheartedly disagree with this. Grinding out your daily experience points is valuable. Grinding is slow. It’s tedious. It takes years to shape and hone and develop skills. Weaving chainmaille is a prime example of this. My job consists of assembling thousands upon thousands of jump rings to create strands of handmade chain. While the end product may vary, the process of linking one ring after another never changes. Open, loop, close. Open, loop, close. It seemed simple enough at first, and I made chains by the foot with no problem. Until one day I realized they were full of problems. Somewhere between year 3 and 4 I found a way to improve and suddenly my chains were smoother, softer, more pleasing to the touch. Another few years go by, weaving every day. Thousands upon thousands of rings. My weaving times gradually get faster and faster, not because my hands are moving quicker, but because I’m making less errors as I go. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Another level up. Seeing problems I never noticed before – scratches from the tools, minuscule warping of the rings from certain ring cutters. Thousands of hours of repetition and these things never occurred to me until they did. Mike Rowe once said if you want to make money, find something to do and then get better at it than anyone. That skill, that knowledge, that experience can only come from grinding out the hours. There is no shortcut. Talent will only take you so far. Eventually you have to put the 24,000 reps in to make it feel like breathing. And then you have to figure out how to breathe better.
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 got into the chainmaille biz when my sister came home from college and made a chainmaille tank top over the summer. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, so she taught me the basics. I’ve been weaving for over 20 years now. I teach classes, write tutorials, and even design some of my own clasps and findings.
I am now deeply obsessed with the art of chainmaille. I dream about it every night. I just think it’s rad! And I want other people to think it’s rad. It has this reputation for being costume-y, overly sexy, or gets banished to the ren faire crowd as dorky. It’s rare to see it featured as an item of actual value and skill. So I’m a huuuge nerd when it comes to getting other people excited about chainmaille. If you want to learn it, I 100% am ready to teach you how to make everything on my table. I have no secrets and I don’t believe in gatekeeping. Any art form needs new blood to thrive and grow. If you die with your secrets, all you’re doing is hurting the medium you claim to love so much.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
My social media presence started out on a joke. I used a funny voice in one video, and that video ended up going viral overnight. All my years of grinding never gave me a blip on the social media radar until that one goofy video. But I harnessed the joke, rolled with it, and have managed to divert the channel back to what I’m good at to drum up business.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Same story as everyone else: Covid hit the world in 2020. Until then, I was working a show every weekend for as long as I could remember. And then they were gone. Every festival, every convention, even the farmer’s markets all vanished literally overnight. I worked a show on Saturday, and when I showed up Sunday, the show promoter was siting out front on his van saying the city pulled all the permits and we all had to go home. Just like that.
Before that, I was only designing 1-2 kits a year for my online store. Suddenly I had to get creative-on-demand! One new kit a month from now until this ended. Supply chains were shot, shipping times were insane, it was a real nose-to-the-grindstone time of forced creativity. I had to design something interesting enough that people would buy with only the supplies I had, and I could only use the supplies where I had enough to make kits out of whatever I had on hand. It was 6 months of panic mode and trial and error. 4 of my designs worked, two flopped completely. But it kept my business alive until the farmer’s markets opened again. And ultimately those sales have continued. Those kits are still selling to this day, so my income has actually increased in the wake of the pandemic.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.steampunkgarage.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/steampunkgarage/
- Facebook: facebook.com/steampunkgarage
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@steampunkgarage