The Power Up ⎯ SN.02/EP.02
One Owner's Secrets To Working With Artists
To curate a unique assortment, many small business owners turn to artists for one-of-a-kind products. Marlo Miyashiro, owner of the Handmade Showroom, now has relationships with over 250 artists. However, working with artists requires a business model that elevates their work and supports their success.
Marlo shares, “As we grew, the goal was to get to more wholesale as soon as possible and now we’re at about 90% wholesale. We do have a few artists who prefer to be on consignment because they are able to give us a lot of different kinds of goods and experiment with our customers. It’s really fun because it keeps a lot of [the artists’] inventory fresh.”
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About The Business
Business name: Handmade Showroom
Founded: 2015
Owner: Marlo Miyashiro
Location: Seattle, Washington
Website: https://thehandmadeshowroom.com
Sales diversification strategy: Storefront, shop-within-a-shop, e-commerce, social commerce
About Our Guest
Marlo Miyashiro grew a community of Etsy artists to open The Handmade Showroom, featuring designer made products. As a professional jewelry artist herself, Marlo understood how to build a business model that benefits makers and properly highlights their work to shoppers.
The Handmade Showroom first started as a pop-up in 2015 then transitioned to a full-time storefront by the end of the year. Four years later, Marlo’s team opened their second store, Bezel & Kiln. In early 2024, Marlo’s team focused on creating a shop-in-shop experience with both of their brands in one location.
Full Transcript
Sean (Thrive): Hello everyone, it’s Sean from Thrive with another episode of The Power Up, where I meet with successful small business owners and operators to learn about their business strategy so you can take their insights and level up your own business. Once your business is ready to expand, knowing what to start can be overwhelming. Our guests have some creative solutions for how they’ve tackled tricky problems and turned them into growth opportunities. Now let’s dive into today’s episode.
Our guest today is Marlo Miyashiro. She’s the co-owner and managing director of The Handmade Showroom and Bezel and Kiln in Seattle, Washington. Marlo sold her own jewelry on Etsy and led the Etsy Sellers Team in Seattle for about 10 years before opening her own store.
Now she curates the best handmade gifts, accessories, and home decor from over 250 artists across the United States and abroad for her retail store. Marlo and her team are continually evolving the business for long-term growth. They have successfully managed a 2-year building renovation, the global pandemic, moving into their fourth storefront in eight years, and most recently merging their two stores into one location.
So Marlo, are you ready to get started?
Marlo (Handmade Showroom): Sure, yep, it’s a lot.
Sean: It is a lot. Well, so let’s dig in and see what we got going for us. First question for me is, I think you’re the first person I’ve ever met who’s led any sort of Etsy Sellers Team, so share a little bit about that experience. I’m sure, you know, our audience has personally not been involved in that before.
Marlo: Yeah, I mean Etsy, this was a while ago, early 2000s. So a friend of mine kind of started an online Etsy Sellers Team. I went in there and I was like, hey, let’s have community events and let’s have meetings and things like that. She was like, do you want to just do it? So I just kind of took over. It was great. We grew the group to about 1,500 members all over Western Washington. We put together, me and my leadership team put together a lot of craft shows, eventually working up to like 100 vendor craft shows in the city, and lots of educational events, just kind of social get togethers, just kind of connecting the Etsy sellers that were in Seattle in the Seattle area.
It was a really great time. You know, a lot of really great community happened, a lot of good connections, and people collaborating through all of that. So yeah, that was a good 10 years of just volunteering my time to be around the community and to be around people who are creative and are pursuing creative businesses.
Sean: Yeah, that’s great. Did, so I know the Etsy Sellers Community was like an impetus for starting your own store. So did you take, or were you able to use, any of those 1,500 members in your own venture? Because you said there are 250 artists across the US involved in The Handmade Showroom. Are any of those part of the Etsy community?
Marlo: Yeah, when we first started in 2015, we were a popup store, so kind of temporary. We were planning on really just weekends, kind of taking it easy. I mean, I had sort of dreamed about opening a store my entire life, like I put price tags on my stuff in my room and made my mom shop in my store in my room and everything. So everything that I’ve done has sort of led up to this point where I was ready to have a storefront and kind of showcase the best handmade that I could find.
I had a full business plan, and it was just kind of a fluke that Pacific Place, the building, the marketing director at the time, reached out to our Etsy group and was like, hey, do you want to do a popup? So we did that.
We started with about 35 artists from our immediate community and that eventually grew into like 50, then 100, and then we moved spaces quite a few times in bigger and smaller spaces. Right now, we’re in I think it’s 4,000 square feet about in our current space, it’s the biggest space we’ve had so far. That allowed us to grow The Handmade Showroom to around 200 artists from all over the US, and Bezel and Kiln have another 50-60 artists that are kind of international.
Sean: How do you go about sourcing artists? Because I’m sure you can’t have every artist in the world in there, but you want to. How do you go about it? Do you think about profitability per artist? Do you think about complementary products with other artists, like in the shop? What do you do in that process?
Marlo: Yeah, well, we definitely have categories in our store. So we have kind of personal accessories like bags, then jewelry, housewares like kitchenware kind of thing, wearables, mostly t-shirts by independent artists, and a lot of toys like stuffed animals and little wood blocks and things like that for kids, toddlers, and infants.
So whenever we’re looking to refresh a particular category, I will look specifically for, like right now, I’m looking for a new line of baby/infant gifts. They’re pretty hard to find. So in our criteria, it needs to be designed and produced by the artist, and so we’re very specific in the kinds of things that we look for. Wherever we search, I definitely use Faire a lot searching for specifically made in the US, but I’m also on Instagram all the time, so I’ll reach out to artists that I find and hope that they’re available to sell wholesale to a store.
Sean: That’s great. Are you doing this on consignment or how does the actual model between you and the artists work?
Marlo: When we first started out, it was 100% consignment, and we do a 50/50 split. We don’t require any fees or work hours, or anything like that. We take care of all the operations. As we grew, the goal was to get to more wholesale as soon as possible. It probably took us about two years to get to 50/50, and now we’re about 90% wholesale.
We do have a few artists who prefer to be on consignment because they’re able to give us a lot of different kinds of goods and experiment with their customers. It’s really fun because it keeps a lot of their inventory fresh that way, too.
Sean: That’s very cool. A lot of folks in our audience have this, not the exact type of model, but maybe one or the other or some blend. If you were to talk to someone thinking about getting into a similar business, what would be some advice or thought process about why consignment or why wholesale? Or why go one way and then switch to the other?
Marlo: Well, having been an artist myself, working with stores directly selling my own jewelry, I knew a lot of the artist side of what I wanted and preferred. The biggest issue for me when I was a consigning artist was reporting, getting back the information, the specific information about the things that we sell and the very specific kinds of items that I would sell. Oftentimes, people would just send me a check and I would have no idea how much inventory was left or how it was doing. So we do all of that.
We have excellent reporting. We allow our artists to take inventory back whenever they need it. That doesn’t happen often, but sometimes people need a little extra for their shows or craft shows. The reporting aspect is so important. We keep really good communication with our artists and definitely let them know where their inventory is at any given time. That’s the consignment side of it.
The benefit of consignment is you don’t have that cash outlay upfront, but it’s a really big responsibility. When we started to transition to buying wholesale, we realized we saved a lot of time by not having to do monthly reports to all of our artists. It went from taking pretty much all day to run the reports and send them out to now a couple of hours because we have a handful on consignment.
Wholesale is definitely more of a risk upfront, but we’re careful about the mix of products we carry and we really listen to our customers and how they respond. The buying is coming from one point of view, mine, so it seems our customer base responds to that. There’s a cohesiveness of quality that runs through all of the items we have. We often get really nice responses like, “Wow, everything in here is really nice, really high quality.” We pride ourselves on that for sure.
Sean: Great. As far as your wholesale tool belt, I know wholesale technology and tools are sparse sometimes. You mentioned Faire. Are there any other essential tools you use for sourcing or managing your wholesale side that might be different from traditional retail?
Marlo: We definitely interact with our vendors or artists more than a traditional retail store because we have that personal connection. We want to share our artist stories with our customers. That’s probably one of the biggest differentiators in how we run our retail store in general.
We see ourselves as maybe a docent of the items we carry. We share information not only about the techniques but also about the artists themselves, maybe their inspiration. That allows the customer to be a little closer to the artists and the work they produce. It’s a really meaningful exchange because supporting small businesses is really important. By supporting us and buying through us, we continue to support all the artists we work with. Our customers really appreciate that too.
Sean: On the artist’s story side, you said you like to share stories with customers. It’s probably hard to measure the impact, but do you feel that by sharing the stories of the wholesalers you purchase from, customers connect more with your business or the artist? If someone listening isn’t doing this, should they? How should they implement something like that?
Marlo: I highly recommend it. It’s difficult sometimes because we assume that when somebody walks into a store, they want to be left alone and shop quietly, and many people do. But we want to make sure they understand the reason we exist. We welcome them in, introduce the concept that we work directly with all the artists, and each display is the artist’s collection. They get to see everything together.
We have little signs with the name and location of the artist so they know what they’re getting into when looking at very different products on the shelves. By offering that information and when they show interest, we can say, “Did you know that line of plush animals? She actually names them and gives them hobbies and a birthdate on the tag.” So they can interact with the merchandise in ways they might not have thought to do.
We encourage people to interact with the merchandise. We help find sizes for shirts and are there to help. We call our employees helpers because the main job is to help and share information. Everything else happens naturally; people are either looking for a gift or find something unexpected that makes them happy. Our overarching theme is that we want people to leave a little happier than they came in.
Sean: Yeah, you do notice the difference between stores that put customer service first by approaching shoppers versus not. Are you training your employees on this? What’s your training process? Do you tell them to say hi to everyone? Do you have someone at the front?
Marlo: We orient them to the different areas in the shop because we have categories in different areas. We have a very thick binder of printouts of artist websites and background info to help the helpers understand more about what they’re looking at. It’s more about sharing information and having a conversation rather than selling because the intention is to support the artist and lift them up, making them the forefront of everything we do. That always leads to people connecting. We don’t worry too much about sales, more about communication.
Sean: I talked to other businesses recently and they all identified a hot product recently. Have you noticed any particularly hot items or categories in the last month or so?
Marlo: Oh gosh, it’s been going on a while now, but mushrooms are still pretty big, mushrooms as a theme. Cottagecore is a really big thing. I think it’s an extension of the fantasy genre. We started carrying a few more tabletop game theme items, which are kind of nice.
We don’t necessarily look for traditional wholesale trends because our artists follow their own creative path. We look at what they have to offer and where we can fit products into our categories. It’s less about trendy things and more about things people connect with and want to take home.
Sean: That’s funny you said mushrooms and tabletop games. I was just out in Asheville, North Carolina, last weekend and there was a retail shop with a whole section for Cottagecore and mushrooms. The people I was with were like, “Wow, there are a lot of mushrooms here for some reason.”
So, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced running The Handmade Showroom and Bezel and Kiln over the years?
Marlo: Oh, there have been many! One of the biggest was definitely the pandemic. We had to close our doors for several months, and that was really challenging both financially and emotionally. We had to pivot quickly to online sales and curbside pickup, which was a huge learning curve. Also, managing inventory without being able to have customers in the store was tough.
Another big challenge was the building renovation we went through, it took two years and required a lot of planning and patience. Coordinating construction while trying to keep the business running was a juggling act for sure.
Lastly, merging our two stores into one location was a big transition. We had to think about how to combine the best of both spaces, keep our artists happy, and make sure our customers still felt at home.
Sean: That sounds like a lot to manage. How did you keep your team motivated through those tough times?
Marlo: Communication was key. We made sure to keep everyone in the loop about what was happening and why decisions were being made. We also focused on celebrating small wins, like positive customer feedback or successful online sales days. Supporting each other and staying connected as a team helped a lot. We tried to be flexible and understanding of everyone’s situations, especially during the pandemic when people had different challenges at home.
Sean: That’s great leadership. Looking forward, what are your goals for the next few years for your business?
Marlo: We want to continue growing our artist community and expand our product offerings thoughtfully. We’re also exploring more sustainable and eco-friendly products, which is important to us and our customers.
Another goal is to enhance the in-store experience with events and workshops that connect customers with the artists. We want to keep evolving while staying true to our mission of supporting handmade and independent artists.
Sean: Awesome. Before we wrap up, what advice would you give to someone who wants to start a retail business focused on handmade goods?
Marlo: I would say, build your community first. Connect with artists, customers, and other small businesses. Be patient and flexible because things will change, and you have to adapt.
Also, stay true to your values and the story you want to tell through your business. That authenticity resonates with people. Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask for help and learn from others who have been there before.
Sean: Wonderful advice. Marlo, thank you so much for sharing your story and insights with us today.
Marlo: Thank you, Sean. It’s been a pleasure.
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