We were lucky to catch up with Katie Stack recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Katie, thanks for joining us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

I am writing this while on vacation…so kinda? I was born and grew up just outside Orlando, Florida and I am the only member of my immediate family to leave Florida, so most of my vacations are trips to visit my family either in Florida or somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains to spend a week at a cabin with the whole group. We have started calling this the annual “Stackcation” and it is an important way for my family to come together, be obnoxious and spend time away from work and normal day-to-day responsibilities.

I also sequester myself for a week most late winter/early spring to do a redesign and have the time and space to focus on my work without the normal distractions of life. In the past when I had a work/sell studio I would rent an apartment within walking distance of the shop, close the shop for a week and give myself the freedom to stay at the studio however long I wanted. One year I did a winter residency at the Penland School of Craft for 6 days and it was a lot like being back in art school and made for an inspirational working vacation. Now that I have moved my studio back home I will often “encourage” my husband to go visit his family in Austin, TX for a week and use that as my time to have my “craftcation”.

Katie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started my business from a very straightforward and practical place. I graduated college with a BFA in costume design and technology (patternmaking) and started working full-time at a major Shakespeare Theatre the day after graduation. I was fortunate to find a job in my field; however, the not-for-profit arts do not pay much, and I needed to make more money to pay my rent in Chicago. I had a couple of options – I could make things and sell them, get a part-time job on top of my full-time job, or find a new career. I decided to start making things and selling them. This was in a time before Etsy and indie websites, so for the first several years, I sold work at local Chicago craft shows and events.

I did the double hustle with a full-time job as a theatrical milliner, managing the crafts department for large costume shops in Chicago, Hartford, and Washington, DC, and running my business on nights and weekends. About a decade into this, I had an Etsy shop and a spot at a prestigious DC weekly craft market, so I left my full-time theatre career and began working for myself. Within two years of leaving my first career, I had a stand-alone website and a small work/sell studio. A couple of years later, a much larger work/sell studio became available, so I moved into that location and had several employees, a successful website, a successful retail location, and more than a dozen consistent wholesale accounts that kept us incredibly busy.

In 2020 I found myself at a point where I had to decide. Was I going to keep my DC shop and employees, and if I was – how would that work with a pandemic, a questionably functional government, and an upcoming election that could easily have gone either way? The week I had to make that decision and notify my landlords was the week that the National Guard and the United States Military came into DC. On my way to work one day, I got stuck on a road by a military convoy, and the answer became apparent: I needed to close my shop and get everything home before the election to have a viable holiday season.

Now I run my online business out of my home studio, and I typically participate in 3-4 larger craft shows a year. In addition, I have stopped all wholesale and taken on one or two handmade business consulting clients at a time. As a part of the new business plan, I limit my work to 40 hours a week, and for the first time in my life, I have weekends off, and I don’t eat cereal for dinner at 9 pm while standing over the sink.

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

When I was working in theatre, I was fortunate to work with many award-winning designers and work with some of the best pattern makers in the United States. Working around that caliber of skill taught me not to fall for the sunk cost fallacy in design or manufacturing. This understanding has empowered me to redesign products, source new suppliers, and not be afraid to get “in there” and make changes.

For example, when designing a new product, I create a checklist of things I want from that product in both a practical “will this fit into my workflow” and an aesthetic “will this fit into the world of Stitch & Rivet?” Once I establish that a design will work in both an aesthetic and practical sense, I will start iterating and working through samples. Once I reach a sample I like and I have sourced supplies, I have a spreadsheet that I use to track all associated costs of goods, manufacturing time, packaging needs, and shipping costs. That spreadsheet determines the direct-to-consumer retail cost of a product in an objective way and allows me to track changes in costs and time.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

I keep in touch with my customers through several channels. First, I use social media (mainly Meta platforms) and try to make it a habit to use Instagram Stories to tell the story of my day literally. I view this as a simple thing I can do to show people my studio workflow and almost treat it like a watercooler. It allows me to show my work without being salesy and to keep in touch with my customer base throughout the day.

My monthly newsletter is my primary source of Very Professional, and I Have A Business contact. I have a relatively high open rate of 57%, and I use my newsletter to tell my customers once a month what I have that is new, what is going on, and, most importantly to me: there is a value-added for the customer. Most of my sales, discount codes, shop refreshes, workshop tickets, and pre-orders are available to newsletter subscribers first. In some cases, those perks are only available to newsletter subscribers. I think of it as: I hate spam, so I will not do that to other people. If someone is willing to give me their valuable contact information, I won’t abuse it, and when I contact them – I will be sure that there is something good in it for them.

I believe that the golden rule of business is the most important thing you can follow. If you as a customer don’t like something to happen to you, don’t do that thing to your customers even if alllllll the blogs and consultants tell you that is industry standard (looking at you, daily marketing emails).

Contact Info:

• Website: www.stitchandrivet.com
• Instagram: @stitchandrivet
• Facebook: @stitchandrivet