Paris Woodhull is a Knoxville-based illustrator with 14+ years of retail experience, including running her own storefront. In this conversation, she gets into what stops great products from selling in stores, what makers consistently misunderstand about the store owner's reality, how to approach a shop in person without making it awkward, and the one thing she'd tell every maker to fix first.

Arianne Foulks is the founder of Aeolidia, a design agency specializing in branding, email marketing, and Shopify sites for creative businesses. She's worked with over 700 brands, grown her team to twenty people, and has a lot of hard-won perspective on what actually makes a product land, or miss, with customers and buyers alike. We talked with her about brand strategy, packaging, photography, and what it really feels like to run a business right now.

Some makers feel intimidated by store owners -- they seem inaccessible, powerful in the maker world, and ultra-discerning in their preferences. Other makers are a cavalier with how they interact with shop owners, being informal to the point of rudeness or using an approach that just isn’t effective. The remedy for both? Really understanding store owners’ experiences and perspectives -- developing empathy for what they’re up to and what they’re all about.

Part of Made to Last – a series of interviews we’re doing with established makers who have grown and evolved their businesses over the long term. We sit down with Sarah Omura of So Handmade and learn about her prioritization of simplicity, and patient evolution of her company over years.

Part of Made to Last – a series of interviews we’re doing with established makers who have grown and evolved their businesses over the long term. We sit down with K’era Morgan of k-apostrophe to discuss her passion of collaboration, exploring new mediums and supporting her community.

Part of Made to Last – a series of interviews we’re doing with established makers who have grown and evolved their businesses over the long term. We sit down with Jonnie Estes of Grey Theory Mill. Jonnie gets specific about how the pandemic and the recession are affecting her sales, the emotional roller coaster of running a business, the good, bad, and ugly of her experiments with ads – and where she is headed now (12 years into running her business.)

Part of Made to Last – a series of interviews we’re doing with established makers who have grown and evolved their businesses over the long term. We sit down with Lori Roberts of Little Truths Studio and learn about how she found her flow with structure and going her own way.

First of all, I hear you. HIRING IS HARD. It’s hard to manage people. It costs money. It takes a huge amount of time to find, vet and train people. You don’t have a big enough studio. You’re an introvert. You have just a small amount of work available. You live in a tiny town. You’re an artist, not a manager. You tried that last year and it didn’t work out.

Part of Made to Last – a series of interviews we’re doing with established makers who have grown and evolved their businesses over the long term. We speak with Becca of Thicket talk money, starting small and focusing on what really matters in a small business.

Today we’re sharing tips for staying healthy and productive from two more powerful makers who know their stuff.

Regular people don’t realize how insane the pre-Christmas months are for makers. But: it’s true, they’re insane.

The sheer quantity of work -- in combination with the uncertainty and pressure of making the most of holiday sales -- adds up to quite the exhausting scenario.