Welcome to the second episode of Hustle on the Hill, the Brown Daily Herald’s entrepreneurship podcast. I’m your host, Laila Posner. Each week, we bring you new episodes featuring local businesses around Providence and interviews with their founders. Stay tuned because we’ve got more great stories and behind-the-scenes insights coming from your favorite local shops and restaurants.
Today, we’re talking with Heather Wolfenden and Savannah Barkley, the owners of Shop Bloom, a creative retail collective located on Wickenden Street that is reimagining what it means to shop local. Through seasonal residencies, Shop Bloom aims to provide small businesses the opportunity to grow their audience and share their stories, while building connections between creators, innovators and customers. This is Savannah.
Savannah: I would say that Shop Bloom is a community space, a space for artists and designers and essentially, folks who are looking to … both shop the products from their local community as well as engage with businesses that are really trying to make it happen … It is a space that not only is a platform for business owners to grow, but also for … people to come together and … do exciting workshops, learn about how to become a business owner and … engage in a really … positive way with … people in their community who are actively trying to make their dreams happen
Laila: This is Heather.
Heather: If you're looking to support small businesses, this is a place that you can go where every purchase that you're going to make matters. We have cute little bags that say “shop like somebody's rent depends on it,” because it does. And that's really how we want people to come to the store if they've never been there before — you know that you're supporting small businesses …from top to bottom. Anything that you buy is really going to make a difference for somebody and make their day brighter.
Laila: Coming into founding the business, Heather brought a decade of past business experience.
Heather: The foundation story behind my business was that I read an article in Forbes that said “I made $100,000 selling on Poshmark” and I was like “I could make $100,000 selling on Poshmark, what do you mean?” And I literally taught myself how to go to the thrift store and look for things that I could sell on Poshmark ... My other business is Island vintage, which is out on Martha's Vineyard. It's a vintage and designer clothing store. I actually started selling vintage and designer here in Providence …almost 10 years ago, doing pop ups, selling at places like Nostalgia and In the Vault.
Laila: This was combined with Savannah’s artistic background.
Savannah: I found Providence through attending RISD, and just loved it so much I didn't want to leave. But essentially, I am a jewelry and accessories designer in my personal small business but my background is actually in … the creative space, photography, video, essentially media production.
Laila: Having both participated in artisan markets, Savannah and Heather got to know each other through that small community.
Heather: Savannah and I had really known each other through the market scene. If anybody's a small business owner in the Providence area or in the Rhode Island area, they probably have a lot of those same market neighbors.
Laila: There, the early vision for the Bloom Collective formed.
Heather: Both Savannah and I, had seen kind of similar models, where small businesses kind of came together in a collective format using underutilized retail spaces. Just a couple months later, we decided that we were going to create a pop up, and it was just supposed to be like a cute little pop up for a few weeks during the holiday season, around Christmas time. And it really turned into a full fledged business very quickly.
Savannah: We were business partners pretty much in a matter of three weeks and there was like no turning back. And we had signed a very short term lease on a shop space. Even though we were only there for a month, we worked with about … 50 plus businesses at the first store.
Laila: Since then, community has emerged as a defining theme in the shop’s story, particularly in how it supports small business owners navigating their work independently.
Heather: I think that a lot of small business owners that we work with are solopreneurs, and they work by themselves, they make all their things by themselves, they set up markets by themselves. They might have a spouse or somebody in their life that they can grab for a little bit of free labor or something but a lot of these folks don’t have any employees … They're just missing a lot of connection and connectivity with somebody in their own space, nevermind if they don’t even work another job … We think it's really important to make real, genuine connections — especially with people that are doing something similar to you.
Savannah: Everything that we've done with Bloom Collective … has been much more about … community over like competition.
Laila: In just a short number of years, the scale of Heather and Savannah’s work has grown exponentially.
Laila: Having past experience founding small businesses has been crucial in their work with the Bloom Collective.
Heather: For me, at least for scaling my own business … There was a lot of things that I learned through the process of … the multiple pop ups that we've done with Bloom … thinking like, “Oh, I think I have a good understanding as to how all this goes” even to us going into Shop Bloom PVD … that was our first real legitimate build out … And it just feels like every experience that we've had, both within Bloom and outside of Bloom, has really allowed us to continue to compile a little bit of experience.
Laila: While scaling the business has been rewarding, the work can be exhausting.
Heather: Working for yourself is basically just choosing the 80 hours a week that you want to work. So you have some freedom and flexibility for a thing here and there, but essentially you are working much more than you would be otherwise. It's going to be tough, but it is a worthwhile endeavor.
Laila: But for both women, persevering has been crucial.
Heather: My biggest fear in life is living with regret. So I would just tell myself to keep on doing it.
Savannah: It's a lot to do with mindset. I would say to … just live boldly and trust your instincts. If you fall on your face, just get up and try again. Making mistakes is okay and a full time job could always be waiting for you, you know? Just show up. Show up to the things you say you're gonna show up to and … what we've noticed with Shop Bloom PVD is like, as soon as people start making the connections, creating the community, it all becomes a lot more tangible and you don’t just feel like your ideas are standing in a void.
Laila: And it takes more than perseverance — starting a business requires consistency in both strategy and branding, Heather explained.
Heather: From a marketing side, consistency is really important … Expanding past your point of comfortability is really important, and from a marketing perspective at least I think that obviously telling your narrative and learning how to tell your narrative is super important, but actually just doing that and doing it consistently is the most important thing I could say … I think it’s really important that if you have a really great story, that you're telling that story so that your customers can also resonate with it.
Laila: Coming from a more artistic background, Savannah brought that lens to creating a unique brand.
Savannah: So I actually started my own photography business when I was in high school. I was always, always, always looking for work. And I think that’s like a big part of also being a small business owner … you are finding the next job, the next client, the next opportunity is a really big part of it. And if you don’t like that kind of thing, it’s a little tricky to be in this business. I always kind of envision myself as a creative entrepreneur.
Laila: With their different backgrounds, Heather and Savannah are able to balance each other well.
Heather: So I admire Savannah's hard work. I trust her, her thought process and I trust her and that’s why I want her as my business partner.
Laila: And through their professional partnership, the two women have also grown to be close friends.
Heather: I have said it before, and I'll say it again, like we value each other more than the business. If there's an issue with the business, we just look to each other to see what the other person feels like we should be doing … outside of simply like a business thing it’s like, you know, can you guys mend your lives together? It really is sometimes like a marriage and it should be taken as seriously as that.
Laila: Thank you Savannah and Heather for coming on the show and sharing your story!
Tune in for our next episode, where we will be talking to Milena Pagán, an MIT grad and chemical engineer who ditched corporate politics to pursue a childhood dream of opening her own restaurant. Malena owns Rebel Bagels in Cambridge and Puerto Rican bakery and restaurant Little Sister in Providence.
This episode was edited, produced and scripted by Lucia Kim and Sofia Seggarra.
Thanks for listening, and don't forget everything great starts with a little hustle.
