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

Hi Katie, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?

Running a small creative business is my third career. I guess you can say I came late to the game of being an entrepreneur but I brought with me a lot of lessons learned. I started working right out of college in the budgeting department of a small software company. That work was pretty dry but it taught me to pay attention to details and how to use a spreadsheet! I then joined the Peace Corps, which inspired me to return to school and switch careers completely upon my return. I became a GIS analyst and mapped & studied food security around the world. I worked with so many different people from so many different backgrounds. My experiences taught me that everyone brings value & perspective to the table so make sure you listen. And if something doesn’t make sense, just ask. There’s never harm in a good question.

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 Katie Leary Sebastian. I co-founded ixöq (ee-sh-auk) with a friend & neighbor, Rebecca Smith in 2018. We both had ties to Guatemala & loved the culture. We were acquainted with a few women artisan groups & looking for a ways to help support them. We saw beauty in the products and value in sharing the cultural heritage with an audience broader than only those fortunate enough to travel to Central America so we started to sell their creations at local popup markets in DC & Maryland. We named our enterprise ixöq, which means woman in the Mayan dialects, Kaqchikel and T’zutujil, in honor of the women we work with.

After a year of primarily selling traditional textiles & a few market totes, we recognized the potential for growth & wanted to increase the number of women we work with & bring our own creativity to the process. We began working with the artisans to create new products & introduce new designs. These are modeled on tradition but are new in concept based on trends and the needs of a growing audience.

As our ideas grew, so did our sales and in turn, the size of the artisan group. We currently work with over 30 women on product production. Our goal remains to ‘provide sustainable employment to women artisans in Guatemala while respecting their culture & needs’, so we’re very happy that our growth has provided work for more artisans. Together we have learned about the balance of work and family in a traditional Mayan culture, the power the women feel in working and sharing their craft, and the importance of collaboration & mutual respect. Our story is embedded in their story and we continue to weave these stories together and share them with our customers.

I currently serves as director & creative, running the day-to-day operations including everything from general management, finance, website development, & product design. We sell both retail & wholesale with about 55-60% of our revenue coming from wholesale. Establishing a wholesale branch of the work has allowed us to more equally distribute production throughout the year which benefits both the artisans & ixöq in general, and allows us to share these beautiful products with a wider audience.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

ixöq began very slowly & very small. We were working with a couple of artisan groups in Guatemala & basically curating the items they were already making into a collection for us to sell in the states in pop-up markets. This helped achieve our goal of supporting artisans but it was very seasonal & lacked creativity on our end. We started designing some products with a small group who worked in textiles but our main interest was to find a group we could work with on the woven recycled plastic tote bags. After a few months searching we found a group & spent about a year working with them on standard designs based on their typical market bag with some improvements in consistency & quality. This was great & interest in our line of cesta totes slowly started to grow. But it was still very seasonal & very hard to predict what people wanted. So I decided to take a HUGE leap and look for opportunities to sell wholesale. My thought was that this would help spread production more evenly throughout the year. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but a friend said ‘you should try a trade show’. So I did some research and found an incubator program & signed up for a trade show. This was such a risky marketing/sales decision because at the time the cost of the show was about 80% of our gross profit (before any other expenses). But we did it. I came up with some new tote designs and colorways & even introduced a brand new product (our nesting cylindrical containers) and packed up and went to NYC. It was amazing but also so obvious that I really was a newbie & didn’t know what I was doing. Thankfully I had wonderful booth neighbors & the incubator program so there were resources to answer most of my questions. The response was very positive & we wrote several orders at the show and began to grow our wholesale business which now is around 60% of our revenue. And we are now able to spread production out more evenly through the year which helps the artisans!

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

ixöq is a unique in our manufacturing process because we rely on a strong & direct working relationship with our partner artisans. Our goal from the start was to provide employment opportunities for women artisans in Guatemala while sharing their craft with a broader audience. BUT we didn’t want to just curate what already was being made. So I started designing & introducing more product that would appeal to audiences in the states. We added a line of storage containers & a series of new tote designs. The designs are ixöq’s but the process is in direct consult with the artisans. This relationship is so important & is a unique feature of ixöq. All of our communication & sharing of order specs is done on WhatsApp & is very specific. There is no middle person managing the process. I work directly with a couple of the artisans who in turn coordinate the work of the group, which has now grown to around 30 women. The coordinators purchase the materials, have the molds made, & determine the production allocation. My role in designing is to create the templates for each product with very specific information on colors, measurements & function. It is challenging to not be able to work through the specifics in person (except for the few times a year when we visit Guatemala) but we make it work. The most valuable thing that I have learned from this is the importance of details in manufacturing. Don’t assume others know what you’re thinking & if you want consistency you need to provide every detail. It makes it easier for the artisans – because nothing is left to question – and the result is stunning collections of consistently beautiful products. Also be understanding. Mistakes are made. Sometimes the wrong color is used. I’ve actually gotten a couple of great design ideas from colors I’d never have thought about combining & our planters were the result of a batch of nesting containers with tops that didn’t fit correctly! The only experience I had from before that helped in terms of design & manufacturing is a good understanding of color & a mind for details.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ixoqboxi.com
• Instagram: @ixoq.boxi
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ixoq51

Image Credits
Ana Isabel Photography