Made to Last Series: Becca of Thicket

This interview is 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. In each interview, we’ll look back at where the maker was a few years ago and then learn what they’re up to today. Our goal is to show you what “success” really looks like for makers. It means something different to each and every person and involves radically different paths – but always includes hard work, uncertainty, creativity, reflection, and failure.

About becca

Becca Perea-Kane is a writer, designer, and owner of Thicket, her minimal, nature-inspired jewelry line. Becca is a nature-lover whose mindset around business is inspiring, grounded, and has evolved to a place of wisdom and encouragement for others in the space.

How it started

Becca went to attended a liberal arts college for English and Studio Arts. Her coursework led her to pursue alternative and sustainable textiles in her work. She gained experiences working for a few creative companies including textiles and jewelry manufacturers. Working for those creative companies made Becca realize her dream of becoming self-employed by working with her hands. So, she began crafting jewelry on the side and once she had fine-tuned her work, she decided it was time to start entering craft shows. Knowing that this decision would require an increase in her inventory, Becca borrowed money from a family member in order to purchase the materials required to manufacture enough items for the show. She was able to pay the family member back and continued attending craft shows. Today, Thicket has a revenue split between craft shows, custom wedding bands, wholesale and online sales. 

In this article, we’ll share a recap and takeaways from our 2020 conversation and then delve into our 2022 update with a recap, 2022 takeaways and our 2022 interview with Becca.

Becca in 2020

Becca shares her experiences working for multiple creative companies. She explains how these experiences along with her coursework in grad school exposed her to a range of business perspectives and goals. She found opportunities for growth, saw entrepreneurs hustle and used that to establish her own set of priorities with Thicket. Becca explains how taking advantage of resources for small business owners helped her establish Thicket and she highlights the importance of having a grip on your business and personal finances.

Takeaways from my 2020 conversation with Becca:

• Find your business priorities. And profit can (and should!) be one of them.
  Working for different businesses helped clarify the ways in which a business can prioritize different things for Becca. She saw that  she wanted Thicket to pay her and be profitable.
  
  

• Your business can be a creative practice and not necessarily your “art”.
  Becca doesn’t romanticize her values towards Thicket. It comes from her and is deeply creative, but for her poetry is more of an artful practice. For her, Thicket isn’t the purest expression of her artistic vision or soul.
  
  

• It’s OK to maintain hands-on, creative time in your business.

  Becca was pushed to be as profitable as possible. But she chooses to prioritize her studio experience at the expense of profit (to an extent) -- it’s all about balance.

  
  

• Keeping a bit of emotional distance can lead to smarter business decisions.
  It can help with decisions like what to continue (or discontinue) offering based on what’s selling well.

  
  

• Remembering the joy that making brings can be life-giving.
  Choosing to spend time making can bring back that feeling of why you started on this journey in the first place.
  
  

• Business tasks can sometimes be tedious, but completion and accomplishment is energizing.
  Sometimes it’s hard to know when tasks are complete. Celebrate checking things off your list, even in the mundane.
  
  

• Pricing is an art and a science.
  Try new things and pay attention to how others react to your pricing for help making refinements.
  
  

• Your website should be beautiful and informative.
  An objective, third party has helped Becca make improvements to her website that she didn’t know she needed.
  
  

• The idea of what we need is sometimes off.
  While you do need to spend money if you want to grow, you can start with the do-it-yourself cheap version and then as you need to, upgrade. But don't necessarily think that you have to upgrade.
  
  

• Being small and scrappy has its advantages.
  If you're small, you can be nimble, and you don't need as much money to be profitable. You might bring in less, but if you're spending less, then you're making more. sometimes doing less or getting by with less means that there's just as much profit.

  
  

To read to the entire 2020 Interview click here. LINK

Becca In 2022

Over the past 2 years Becca has shifted from doing as many craft shows, to showcasing her jewelry in a small shared retail space. She has honed the power of presentation and found a passion for working with other small business owners. She has begun attending trade and craft shows again, with mixed results. She shares her take on those results and bestows her wisdom on finding balance, maintaining healthy financial habits and starting small.

takeaways from our 2022 interview

• Sometimes, there are things you only think you need.
  “You can own a business without business cards.” In the early stages of Thicket, Becca felt that she needed certain things to be a business owner. She still has business cards, but if they get forgotten, it’s not the end of the world. This is a theme that has continued with Becca since we spoke with her in 2020. Another great example she shared was on her perception of how active Thicket needed to be on Instagram to remain successful. This resulted in Becca regularly expending a large amount of effort into making and scheduling posts, which was not her interest or passion. When she eventually let Instagram fall off her plate, Thicket’s sales remained steady. Meaning that she could take the energy she had previously put into maintaining that platform and put it to better use. She now uses her retail space and newsletters to do more personal and grassroots marketing.
  
  

• Your business is not your life.
  For a long time, Thicket was Becca’s entire life. By discovering other things that are important to her, she has been able to even out her work-life balance. Now, Becca schedules her time in blocks. This helps her to accomplish what is needed and breakaway once the time allotted for a project is up. She is able to actually enjoy a day off, and prevent burnout.
  
  

• Think about the smallest way to start and then scale up.
  When planning their move into a shared retail space, Becca and David (her partner) decided to find the way of doing a test run for the lowest investment possible. By doing so, they were able to get an idea of the investments required for a larger space and what locations might be best suited for their space. Additionally, David used the coffee cart to test if the day-to-day of running a coffee shop aligned with his preconceived notions before signing a lease or investing a large sum of money.
  
  

• Presentation can make a big impact on perception and sales.
  Becca found that when her jewelry was displayed in an IKEA case that had shelves at the wrong height, reactions to her jewelry pricing were often sticker-shock. After installing custom Ash display cases with lids that raised, the eye-raising reactions to her prices ceased. By simply changing the display case to something more crafted, and purpose made, she had placed her jewelry in a different category and the subconscious expectation of her prices was elevated.
  
  

• Know your finances.
  Money is something that many are taught early on not to discuss, but that rhetoric is not conducive to running a successful business. So, whether it makes you cringe inside, or bores you to death, financial bookkeeping will always be a part of owning a business. That is why Becca empowers other small business owners to talk about finances, get the information needed to make decisions, do their taxes and invest in what is important to their values. 

Our Full 2022 Conversation with Becca:

How has your business evolved or grown since we spoke 2 years ago? And more broadly how has your work life changed since then?

I think that in the last 2 years it's probably become more and more clear what is important to me and also what actually needs to happen. I think early on in my business I had all these ideas about the things that I thought needed to happen that now I realize don’t matter. A small example of that is business cards. When I was a new business I was like “ I NEED to have business cards!” but now I’ll go to an event and realize “Oh, I don’t have cards with me. It’s not ideal but it's not the end of the world. I can still have a business without business cards.” I think clarification for myself and also seeing that my business is one part of my life, instead of my whole life. Early on in my business and before the pandemic I was just working on my business ALL THE TIME. Now, I think there's other things I’ve realized I also care about. One thing is helping other small businesses. I’ve been working with a non-profit here in Maine to do small business consulting and working one-on-one and doing seminars. 

With the transition of having a day job again, 3 or 4 years before the pandemic, I was just working for myself. So having a day job again opens up this portal to other things I care about like budgeting and finance, and personal finance and especially through the lens of ‘for creative people.’ Yeah the consulting work, having a day job, having a partner with a small business all of those things, it's like Thicket is not the only thing. So finding balance between those and then also feeding myself, cleaning our house, that kind of thing. It’s seeing Thicket in the constellation of things I care about and realizing that at any point in time those can all be dialed up or down depending on what I need. 

Have you made changes to your management of Thicket or your time in relation to Thicket that kind of enshrines that insight? For instance, I only work on Thicket from 9 to 1 on these days or I no longer do this kind of sales because it's too time consuming or anything like that?

I think currently what it looks like is having time slots where things happen. Like on Wednesday afternoons I pack and ship online orders. Also having days off that are actual days off where I don't work on my business. I think having set times and also having other things going on means those set times are enforced because there's only up until then, and then it has to be done.

What impact of those shifts do you see in your sales?

One of the things I thought I needed to do is Instagram. It was wearing on my soul. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it felt like it was sucking life force energy out of me and I didn’t like it. At a certain point, I just stopped posting and that wasn’t the best way for it to happen because it wasn’t intentional. I just stopped scheduling posts. That’s not a recommendation. It’s just what happened. I thought “oh no! Sales will also plummet” but that has not been the case. It's one of those things that the idea of what I thought I needed to do was putting so much pressure and I was spending so much time and energy into it. It was soul sucking.

It (Instagram) just wasn't as important as I thought . So, now I’m thinking because sales are about the same, about how to grow sales through things like email newsletter marketing and that kind of thing instead. Having the retail space also means there is more interaction with people happening in real time and that feels like a kind of grassroots marketing.

Let’s Talk about the retail space. So start us from your partner’s coffee venture, give that context and what it looks like now that it’s a retail space.

David and I started talking about it like 3 - 4 years ago, this idea of a shared retail coffee space. He makes really beautiful small wood goods like spoons and cutting boards. So, he also has these things that he makes and he loves coffee and loves the kind of community aspect of coffee bringing people together. And the idea of a shared retail space is something we had been thinking about.

So, North Adams, which was a really small town, it felt like a place that needed a coffee shop and we had been thinking about it there. We actually met with a few people connected to the community in different ways. We met with a city counselor and someone involved with Assets to Artists, which is a grant program that relocates artists there, and we were talking through this idea and getting feedback on it. And asking who else should we be talking to? I remember having those conversations in January and February of 2020. Then I went to the American Craft Show in Baltimore and came back and right after that it was like “oh no it's pandemic. It's definitely not the time for retail space.” None of us knew how long this was going to last or what it would look like. So we put the retail space on the back burner and then for life reasons, family reasons and all kinds of reasons we ended up in Portland, Maine about 2 years later.

It was still a pandemic and we were kind of thinking about “what are ways that we can test that idea that are as small as possible? That requires as little financial and logistical commitment as possible?” So, David and I built the mobile espresso cart and he set up outside all around Portland for the summer of 2021. It was this way of checking whether or not he liked running a coffee business. He had worked in coffee in some small ways but most of his professional background was in writing, editing and some woodworking. It was checking before we go any further, to make sure that the day to day of interacting with people that much and serving coffee was viable.

It was definitely different from Thicket, in that it required a much bigger initial investment. With Thicket, I would go and sell a necklace and then I would have $100 to go and buy another hammer. This did require some “we need this chunk of money to go and buy this item or thing to do this.”  It definitely put it into perspective. We wanted to see what a 6 foot by 2 foot cart cost to answer the question of “What if we were to do a 5 year lease in a full coffee shop?”

So there was no retail component to that other than the espresso piece to it?

That was testing the coffee side, and Thicket has gone through that testing phase. I’ve been a part of a shared studio showroom infrastructure before, and I had a sense for what that would feel like. It was the coffee side that was unknown. I don’t think we felt like “Oh we’re going to start the cart and then, as soon as we can, transition to a store front.” We realized pretty quickly that it’s a lot of work.

Anyone who’s done craft fairs before knows what it’s like to set up and break down and he was doing that every day. For sustainability and his energy, that was a lot. And in Maine, the winter is obviously not great. So he was popping up inside other businesses during the winter.

So the Black Boxes, this thing we moved into, is a collection of shipping containers. I think there’s 5 of them in a row. They have short term leases, they’re small, about 300 square feet, but it was exactly what we needed. One happened to open up in October, we heard back from the landlord that there would be one opening available in the winter. We signed the lease and moved in, in late January. We did the build out which took about 6 weeks and opened in March.

So do you shopkeep some of the time?

Yeah, I go and the past few days we’ve been looking at Square. It’s our point of sale. It provides reports for what the busiest hours are so that I can have set hours for being there. We’ve found that at 3 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, there’s only one person there and given how big the space is, there doesn’t need to be more than that. On the weekend it can be quite busy, and it can be hard for him to sell jewelry and make coffee. So if those things can be happening simultaneously, and I can help with some amount of the coffee stuff. He’s really craft oriented when it comes to the coffee, so no one wants me making cappuccinos but I can help with some aspects of the coffee side of things. I help with jewelry and facilitating people in the space. It is a little awkward, because it’s a shipping container, so it’s long and narrow, and getting people to move through the space is interesting. 

That’s amazing and has your jewelry been selling well in that space?

Yeah, it’s been a really interesting little science experiment. The effect of displays on jewelry sales.

How cool! You can mess with it as much as you want.

For the first month or two we were open, I just had this piece from IKEA that was a black metal glass display, bookcase kind of thing. There was one shelf at the right height and the other shelves were too high or too low. So, I had a furniture maker friend of mine actually build some custom Ash display cases that are far and away the most beautiful pieces of furniture we own and they’re not even in our house. Those were finished about a month ago and they’re in the space now. They are counter height with enclosed glass and they lift up.

The difference in the way people relate to that versus the too high to low shelf thing, it's made a really big difference. I think it indicates on a subconscious level that this is fine jewelry. They’re not startled by the price point. Previously people would have that reaction that I’ve seen that at craft shows before, where you pick something up to show them, they ask how much it is and they’re like “Oh.” Now, it’s the expectation and it’s more inline. People are not having that “Oh.” 

I think we have more plans for the build out in other ways. We would like to bring David’s wood goods in and possibly a few other thing but it’s a really small space so I don’t think we’ll ever carry a whole wide selection of lines but we would like to bring in a little bit. 

And how has wholesale shifted for you?

I’m still doing Shoppe Object. It’s been a really good show for me to do. I think each time I’ve pretty consistently gotten new accounts, and I have stockists that will place re-orders at the show. Then I also have stockists that I will see there that will place orders through other channels or they aren’t coming to New York. It’s been good and I’m curious to see what will unfold over the next few months. When I did Shop Object last fall, it was the first one after the thick of the pandemic, and people were just excited to be back at Market. I definitely had a lot of mixed feelings about doing it. The show management was extremely careful, they ran it well, and there were a lot of safety protocols in place. I had a lot of ambivalence about it, like “ I’m going to go to a trade show!?!?!”

Once I was there, I remembered that I love being in this space. When you walk in and it's set up day with everyone hammering on their walls, and there are dollies and things going everywhere. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed it until I was back in that environment. That was the best show numbers wise that I had had up until that point. In the winter it was a little bit quieter. It's so strange that there are these markers of where we are in the pandemic, that was right when Omicron had emerged and it was winter in NYC, so it was a quieter show.  I’m curious what it will mean for this fall and winter with the feeling of “is there a recession coming, are we already in one, and all of that.” It's in about a month so we’ll see.

Have you noticed the economic uncertainty manifesting in your business in other ways? Or is it hard to tell because you’ve made so many shifts, that it’s not like you have very steady inputs to compare?

I feel like I’m too small of a sample size to know. I did do a craft show in the Hudson Valley, Field and Supply, I was there in May and it was a confusingly slow show. I don’t know if it was dovetailing with the Fed raising interest rates. This is a dark detour, but it was also the weeks following the Uvaldi School Shooting and people were just not wanting to shop. There were really difficult things going on and I think people didn’t feel like going to a craft fair. That’s totally fair and reasonable.

I thought about how I would feel if I wasn’t signed up to be there. The world is hard right now, and I think there's been many times that's been the case. But It feels like, to be a person that makes. Who makes things that aren’t necessary, in a moment where there is so much important work that needs to happen and at a moment when so many people’s lives are hard. Well, that feels tied into the bigger question of economy and of what’s going on.

As you look forward, how are you thinking about your business projects? And how you want them to shift in relation to each other, or grow within themselves? Is there anything that you want to try or bring into the mix?

I feel like the retail space feels like a point of energy, community and connection. So I feel like there is something there to dig into and grow. It feels like we are very early in that, like we’re still in the “planting seeds” phase. And I there’s ideas I have around what Thicket focuses on. I am really excited about the idea of transitioning my actual line and the natural objects that I work with more fully to native plants and tying that aspect into the work.

Could we also talk about what you’ve been working on with the non-profit and what types of things you want to finances for creative businesses.

The women's business center in Portland, Maine and my contract with them just ended. Which is sad. I've been doing it since we moved to Portland. It was a lot of helping people develop their websites, online presences and doing website auditing to find points of opportunity to make the site stronger and encourage more online sales. A lot of the businesses were farmers, makers, and people doing more in person sales, even cafes and restaurants, all learning how to sell more online. And so that was mainly around e-commerce but it also overlapped with the bookkeeping and operations side of things.

I realized that I really love helping other small business owners one-on-one, thinking through the problem solving, looking at “Here’s what’s going on and here is where we want to go. What can we do to get there?” Between that and working at YNAB, where I’m helping them to build resources for small business owners, I’ve gotten really excited about not necessarily doing the booking keeping for small business owners but the idea of helping businesses understand how set up and manage their own bookkeeping. So if they work with an accountant or file their own taxes, identifying the things they need to think about throughout the year.

I also think it’s so important for small business owners who work for themselves to set up a retirement account. The personal finance side of things feels even more important, having an emergency fund and all those kinds of things. I think I’m still trying to figure out what coaching and working people directly looks like. Right now it’s a lot of working with YNAP and working on the information that goes out to a lot of people. Which is still interesting to me, but it feels like helping in that situation where people are saying “I don’t know how to set up my bookkeeping and I’m scared about it. And I’m worried I’m going to do something wrong, and I don’t like it and it’s boring.” I think that creative people are given so many unhealthy, unhelpful and untrue narratives about money that I’m doing whatever I can to help undo some of that. I feel like the money side of a business, it’s problem solving and creative in many of the same ways that other parts of a business can be.

Right, so you feel like “ No! You’re not bad at it! You only think that. I can show you!”

Yeah!

That’s what I think is so interesting, that you must be so good at helping people with, is partially getting your money in order is a means to an end in terms of filing taxes or whatever you need to do but its also laying the groundwork so you can get insights so that you can manage your business. I think that's something people really struggle with, is “What am I supposed to be looking at exactly? And what kind of insights could I draw?” But sometimes that can be so powerful, when you’re working with someone who realizes that 90% of their sales comes from 2 channels and they’re working in 5 channels. Well, maybe you don’t need two. Then it’s “ Oh My Gosh, I hated those channels!” That seems like an area you would have a lot of skills around.

That’s where it can be creative, and tied into your values. It’s asking “What do you care about?” and aligning the money your business is spending with what you care about. 

There is a cultural mandate of not talking openly about money. That makes it hard for people to engage with materials that have so much to do with money. And know how to respond, how to talk about it and how to work in tandem with people in those conversations. It’s often “I’m not supposed to talk about this,” but there is a double expectation where we’re not supposed to talk about money but you’re also supposed to know exactly what to do about money. How can both of those be true?

Upcoming

If you appreciated what Becca shared here, and want to hear more, then we’ve got good news for you! She’s co-teaching a course with our sister company, One Mill School! It's our Money Intensive and you can read all about it here. (The deadline to sign up is January 17, 2023!)

We are so excited to continue to talk money with Becca over at One Mill School! A big thank you to Becca for sharing her voyage with us here at Wholesale In a Box. It was such a pleasure to hear from someone who is so committed to aiding her community. We can’t wait to see what’s over the horizon for her and Thicket.

You can find our other Made to Last interviews here: 

• Doing The Next Right Thing With Sarah Omura

• Finding Flow with Lori Roberts

• A Deep Dive with Jonnie Estes

• K’era Morgan of k-apostrophe

• And more coming soon!