We were lucky to catch up with Kamri Cordero recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kamri, appreciate you joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

My business partner and I were 19 when we started our business! We got the idea while we were in college at Southern Utah University, I (Kamri) was studying marketing and communications and Audrey was studying hospitality, tourism, and business. We are best friends and would road trip every weekend to get away from homework and the small town and on our road trips we would collect stickers of all the places we would travel. It came to a point where there just weren’t any cute sticker options to choose from at these gift shops but we would reluctantly choose one to bring home as our souvenir of that place!

One day we got the random idea to just design our own stickers! Audrey and I have been artists all growing up so designing wasn’t a hard task, but digitizing them and printing them was something we had no idea about. So I learned Adobe Illustrator and we began to create designs of the places we traveled one day in an Outdoor Recreation class my classmate noticed me designing a new sticker and told me about a market she was hosting for all students on campus! It was called the bargain bash and the idea was that you brought everything from your dorm or apartment that you didn’t want and you sold or traded it to other students for their unwanted belongings.

Selling stickers at something like this felt silly but we went along and got some stickers designs ready and printed and set up a booth at the Bargain Bash! Within a couple of hours, we had made $300 and realized that this had potential as a business. So from that day forward, we decided to actually try and create a business out of these sticker designs. We started an Etsy, website, and attended even more markets.

Slowly our business has grown into what it is today and we have experienced a lot of cool opportunities from it! We have been on podcasts, in newspapers, traveled the states for markets, met and networked with other amazing businesses and people, and we have sold to every state in the US! We are continually growing still and have big dreams and goals for the future, but Audrey has been on an LDS mission in Vietnam for the last 18 months and I (Kamri) have been running it alone along with a day job since then so the growth has been slow but positive as well!

Day one, we never thought it would turn into something like this, we expected to do it as a hobby for ourselves and now it is so much more! But the beginning was hard, not understanding the industry of stickers and gift items was a huge learning curve and I remember spending months just researching how to make stickers, where to get stickers manufactured, what to charge, what platforms to use to get started. It was such a daunting experience but I am so happy that we stuck with it and put in the very hard work in the beginning to get to where we are now!

We didn’t start making real money that could actually pay us back until about a year ago when we got in with REI and a Salt Lake company called Salt & Honey. These two wholesalers have changed the game for us and now we are finally in a place where we can say we are making a full-time living off of Roaming Heart. Wholesale has been a game changer in general for us and learning how to market to business has been more helpful than I actually had realized.

Kamri, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Kamri and my business partner’s name is Audrey, and we are the co-founders of Roaming Heart. We got into the business while in college when we decided to turn our sticker collecting into an actual design company. We had mentors and attended pitch competitions while in college in order to get the word out and start growing! We specialize in stickers but we have also created pins, patches, hats, tees, sweatshirts, and keychains! We are also looking into growing into more outdoorsy items like water bottles, fanny packs, hammocks, camp chairs, etc.

Our motto is “Inspired by the places we roam” and in this, we hope to inspire others to get outside and to be inspired by the world around us as well! We have also hosted clean-up days, outdoor days, and other types of community involvement in order to actually get people outside and educate them about proper recreation and creating a safe space where people feel comfortable being outdoors.

Honestly, I think we are most proud of the fact that we actually started a business in general, it may sound silly but everyone was against us. We lost friends in college because of it, our families thought it was silly and a waste of time, we had mentors tell us that this would never be profitable and we shouldn’t try. When the whole world felt against us we continued on and started the business anyway and showed ourselves that we could in fact do this. So to look back at those days with where we are now and to be able to see that we did it makes it all worth it! It makes us feel like we can do anything now.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Our biggest goal is to inspire people to get outside but we also focus a lot on educating people to recreate in the outdoors responsibly as well! Audrey and I both graduated from SUU (The most outdoorsy college in the nation) with a minor in Outdoor Recreation and Tourism. This part of our degree taught us a lot about recreating correctly, risk management, and simple skills to use in the outdoors, as well as other things like Leave No Trace, and the 10 Essentials.

We realized as we were learning about these skills and “rules” of the outdoors that this wasn’t common knowledge so we have also made it a part of our brand to spread the awareness of how important it is to take care of our land! We have had a lot of people really resonate with our brand because of this niche goal of ours. We have seen it help people feel more comfortable in the outdoors and trying new activities.

The outdoors truly are for everyone that knows how to recreate and enjoy them correctly and we are here to help facilitate that conversation!

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Yes, buying an artists work will always help but there are so many other ways to help support an artist that do not cost money!!

* word of mouth
* writing a review
* Share our social media posts
* or interact with our social media posts (nicely)
* Word of mouth
* Join email and newsletter lists
* Tag friends to our social media posts
* Give a shoutout
* post on your own social media about us
* check in with your local artists and see how they’re doing (we’re human too)
* Be patient! We are usually a one to two man band and are trying to juggle everything at once in our small businesses!

Contact Info:

• Website: roamingheart.co
• Instagram: instagram.com/roamingheart_
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roamingheartstickers
• Other: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RoamingHeartStickers https://faire.com/welcome/r/personal?fdb=roamingheart&signUp=widgetv2&widgetToken=bw_ud49jsk4zv

Image Credits
Audrey Tran Kamri Cordero