We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kay McDonald. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kay below.
Kay, appreciate you joining us today. Can you share a customer success story with us?
Take the Lead Women: Gloria Feldt
Gloria Feldt is a woman with a mission and the founder of Take The Lead. Take The Lead believes that power is an infinite resource all women possess. In fact, they believe, like many, the more women in power the better! Take The Lead offers a special program to women in the nonprofit sector. 50 Women Can Change the World Nonprofit joins influential women from diverse backgrounds to build a community. This community, in turn, will help change the world by harnessing the power of women. In order to celebrate the exceptional women who, complete this Take The Lead course, they wanted a special memento: sterling silver Embracelets.
Our founder, Kay McDonald, had the pleasure of working with Gloria personally on this very special bracelet to commemorate graduates of her program and remind them of the power and the parity the program provides. According to Gloria, “They love their bracelets!” Charity Charms is honored to work on this project.
Kay, 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?
Charity Charms
The Power of Women/The Power of Charms
For over a decade, Charity Charms has provided customized logo and symbol charms for communities and non-profit organizations throughout the world. Our proprietary process allows us to uncover the essence of a community’s brand. We create their power symbol or unique logo to unite their group and help them to spread the word with a charm their community loves to wear and talk about.
We are a female-owned Social Enterprise based in Arizona. Our charms are made of recycled pewter and sterling silver and are proudly designed and handcast in Arizona. A very meaningful aspect of Charity Charms products is that they are assembled and packaged by our non-profit partner, Seeds for Autism.
Here’s how it works:
Discovery – Tell us all about your group
Design – We work with you to create your symbol and charm package
Outcome– Your group feels special and united through the power of charms
2022 is the Year of the Woman and our focus is on woman’s organizations, boards, and communities.
Our Interview series, The Power of Charms, shares Inspiring stories of powerful women and the symbols they love that define them. Power of Charms is also a book available on Amazon.
Through the meaningful charms we create, we provide a way to empower, inspire and unite women and the organizations they serve to create a legacy of support that lives on.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Our biggest market has been custom branded charm gifts for conferences and events. Our “Charming Custom products” are physically given as a thank you for attendance, a donation, or recognition. When the pandemic hit we saw this market come to a quick halt. Events got canceled like dominoes and it was abrupt and unplanned.
We took a look at what resources we had and realized …it was the amazing stories of our clients. They needed to keep the awareness going for their missions, especially since their in-person venues were not an option. We could help them by sharing their stories.
Charity Charms has a large and diverse community that we stay connected with through Social Media and E-Mail. We wanted to stay engaged and it seemed the best way was to share stories of inspiration to keep us and our clients in front of the world.
ZOOM became our interview platform and we started reaching out to our clients to tell their stories. The Power of Charms concept was expanded as we uploaded and enhanced our YouTube station, and converted the interviews into a podcast, blog, and e-mail series.
I had always wanted to write a book and once we had finished over 20 interviews it seemed like a natural progression to turn them into a book. And so, our compilation book “The Power of Charms” was launched to Inspire and Inform. and tell the Stories of Real Women Leading Powerful lives, focusing on the charms that defined them.
Volume 1 launched on Amazon in August 2021 and we are working on Volume 2 to follow.
Now that the world has opened back up to in-person events our business is booming like never before.
And, we attribute that to the stories we kept telling and the connections we kept building.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
The Pandemic was our 2nd biggest challenge in the history of Charity Charms. Our first was in 2008, after being in business for 4 strong years.
We were going strong and focusing on a growing sterling silver charm business to support non-profits. Then we had the crash and two forces collided that almost brought us to our knees:
1) The price of sterling silver doubled
2) Charities and their supporters had limited funds to invest in our products
Luckily, one of my key partners recommended I meet his friend, that had a pewter factory…here in Arizona.
We met and realized there was a huge opportunity to service a market with a lower-priced version of our high-end charms.
Pewter charms, coupled with some innovative silicone bracelets (which were inspired by a friend’s daughter wearing some) helped us launch a new product line called GivingBands. These colorful and versatile bracelets helped us re-invent our concept and are still one of our most popular items to help spread awareness and fundraise. In fact, 2009 was our best year ever!
In 2022, along with our book, we re-launched our sterling line in a big way. Now our clients have the best of both worlds.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://charitycharms.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charitycharms_thepowerofcharms/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CharityCharms/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaymcdonald/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/charitycharms
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CharityCharms
- Other: The Power of Charms Book on Amazon amazon.com/Power-Charms-Kay-McDonald/dp/1087980224/ref=sr_1_7?crid=PFJ46WYUWTW1&keywords=the+power+of+charms+book&qid=1648076160&sprefix=the+power+of+charms+book%2Caps%2C491&sr=8-7