We were lucky to catch up with Mary Beth Van der Horst recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mary Beth, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

Some of the smallest successful businesses have to rely on family to get by. When profits are thin and the need for labor is high, it’s your loved ones that step up to support a the passion they see in your heart. Building a business from scratch without a lot of money to cushion the beginning years is tough. I would have to call my frame shop something of a family business even from day one when it was just me, but 3.5 years later it is growing and entangling more and more of my family. When I started, I couldn’t even get approved for a loan through my bank nor the Small Business Administration. It was my late grandmothers inheritance to my dad that made it possible to get started–a loan I am still dutifully paying off and beyond grateful to have been able to fall back on. My husband joined me a few years later after losing his father and having an epiphany that time is best spent with family and if he was going to pour his heart into a job, it may as well be our own business. This year, we found ourselves expecting our first child. Yet again, we found ourselves needing to lean on family as my energy drained and business boomed greater than ever. My recently retired mother volunteered to help one day a week, but she found and shared the passion I have for the work we do as well, and I suddenly found her helping out 3/5 days out of the workweek. Everyone involved has adopted a niche in production, and is proud seeing their work and the impact it has on each other and the customers we serve. My husband, Cole, builds frames and can focus on making each one as flawless as possible. My mother puts everything together cleanly, seals the frames and fits them with the appropriate hanging hardware. With their help, I can focus my own energy on design, sales, mounting artwork in nondestructive ways, and managing the business at large and workflow of each order. Now our little son, Damian has just been born and as soon as we’re able, we’ll reopen with him at our sides as well. I know he’ll have a very enriched childhood learning alongside us, but I would never force him to work for us when the time comes. If he relates to the passion we have to our craft, wonderful! He’s welcome to partake in it. However, if his heart yearns to find a passion of his own, that is equally wonderful and I’ll encourage him to chase it. I know picture framers from all over the globe, and they all fell into their craft a bit differently. Some fell into it because they were artists wanting to frame and sell their own work, some were hired as apprentices and went on to become masters, some bought old frameshops with the mindset of businessmen, and some of us picked up the craft from being raised into it. For Damian, he has an opportunity for a career path, but it is certainly not a sentence to be served.

Mary Beth, 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 followed my passions through school, relishing the arts and the sciences, and seeking a purpose in their intersections. At first I believed I could find fulfillment in medical illustration, which led me to dual major in art and biology. While studying, I worked part time at A.C. Moore(an arts and crafts supplier) as well as tutoring other students in a variety of subjects. I enjoyed teaching people, especially in biology or art media and techniques. Upon graduation, I took a full time position at the same store as their custom framing department manager. It was new for me and I fell into it, soon discovering that it was one of those perfect nodes where (when done right) the arts and sciences collide in a beautiful way. I pushed myself to learn as much as I could about it. I took my time teaching my customers the chemistry and physics involved, and they too realized how specialized custom framing can be. When AC Moore was dissolved as a corporation, my customers encouraged me to go independent, because they had invested their trust in my expertise. I never once expected to be a business owner before that moment, but the confidence and encouragement of others made it an easy choice to take the leap. Once I had my own operation, I continued to teach myself more about conservation science and pushed for better and better practices to help preserve every kind of art or item as long as possible. I like being able to tell my customers that I can provide museum quality preservation for any project. My knowledge, materials, artistic design, and personability all combine to make me stand out as an exceptional framer.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I thought that opening at the start of covid would have been my greatest challenge, but I’m living through a real test at this moment. I’m great at planning and preparing for hard situations, but they can still surprise you out of nowhere. I planned and saved for a good 6 months for the birth of our first child, even setting all of my customers up for the expectation that I would be closed for a month or so after his due date this Christmas. However, he decided to make his way into the world 10 weeks early on October 19. I was closing the shop that night, was surprised by a little trickle of blood, and went to the emergency room in what I thought was an abundance of caution. A few hours later, I was diagnosed with a placental abruption and on a helicopter bound for MUSC for an emergency C-section. I’ve been in Charleston ever since, going on a month now. Baby Damian was born at 30 weeks, but an alarmingly healthy 17 inches and 3 lbs 15 oz. As big and strong as he is, he still needs the specialized help only MUSC’s NICU can provide to help his development until he is grown enough to come home. It’s stressful leaving my business so much earlier than anticipated. I’ve got all kinds of Christmas projects for my customers, which I hope to come back to and finish in time. I had someone put a sign on the door and I’ve updated my social media, but haven’t had the chance to change my voicemail to alert anyone who calls. Those that have found out have been very sympathetic and suddenly their deadlines don’t seem as hard as they once were. One of the beautiful things about small business is that customers know exactly who their money goes to support. They’ve seen me, my husband, and my steadily growing belly and know that their patronage goes straight towards keeping us alive and growing as a family. When we have a setback, they know there’s not much we can do but their hearts go out tenfold. I’ve had customers buy me baby clothes and make blankets in anticipation to meet him for the first time, or even buying us meals when they heard we were trapped in Charleston without an income. The love and support we’ve received when otherwise helpless has been heartfelt and lifesaving. Their own welcoming of our son into the world just goes to show that my customers are more than just that–they are an extension of our family, and they support the strength and solidarity of the business just as much as me and my actual kin.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Throughout this year, one of the toughest lessons I had to unlearn was the efficiency of doing everything myself. There’s a deep level of trust involved when framing someone’s priceless artwork or irreplaceable heirloom. It took years of earning that trust, one project and customer at a time before I could even open my own business, and then to make it grow in the years since I went completely independent. I thought that isolating myself from outside help was one of the shop’s aspects that people appreciated–that there were no other employees or outside agencies that could impart risk to their belongings. Pregnancy changed everything though. I suddenly found myself with a fraction of the energy I had relied on my whole life, and more projects than ever before. My turnaround time doubled almost immediately and I knew there was no way to keep the shop open nor provide for a growing family without unlearning that fierce sense of independence and learning to lean on others instead. This is where family truly came in clutch. My mom, a recently retired teacher of 30+ years, was eager to offer her time. I taught her the basics of fitting together frames and she has been the second pair of hands I most needed to keep the cogs turning. It’s safe to say she’s where I got many of the skills that cut me out to be a good framer, so in turn, she’s been the perfect student and it’s been a stimulating new experience for her. She handles numbers and measurements well, as a former math teacher, and constantly finds crossover skills and comparisons to her lifelong hobby of quilting. Similarly, my husband has been an invaluable source of trustworthy help for the last couple of years. Originally when he joined me, I felt guilty for taking his time and help. He used to be our primary source of income, as a restaurant kitchen manager, but after losing his father to a heart attack at 58, he decided that he needed to change his own pace of work and priorities to avoid a similar fate and to be able to spend time with family while he had the chance. He’s since found another less stressful job to help supplement our income, but still comes in to build frames on his days off. It’s not surprising that he gravitated towards the woodworking and finishing aspect of the shop, as his father worked as a carpenter for most of his life. It lives on in his blood. I could not have survived this year or achieved the shop’s current rate of success on my own. It took a mosaic of help, and the cement of love and trust only family can provide.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: www.instagram.com/MaryBeth.Frames
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/MaryBeth.Frames

Image Credits
All self taken by Cole or myself, save our first family photo taken by one of our NICU nurses.