It is my greatest joy and honor to serve as business consultant, personal coach, and bosom friend to artisans who have BIG visions for their business and their lives, simply because they know more is possible– even if they can’t explain why. Together we create the most authentic, inspired, and profitable version of their business online.

Using my personal experience BUILDING A 7-FIGURE artisanal business, my sharp intuition, and my playful nature, I partner with gutsy women who know in their bones that they would rather give their dreams everything they’ve got– spiritually, emotionally, physically; than live their lives wondering what could have been.

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I help you, in the same way I helped my former business partner, with things like learning how to sell online, hiring, building infrastructure in your business, INCREASING YOUR PROFITABILITY, creating marketing systems that build community, generate sales, and increase efficiency.

Together We Co-Create Wildly Profitable Online Businesses that:

  • Are in alignment with your values– your authentic success is never at the expense of what’s important to you– sustainability, ethical sourcing, fair wages, etc. 
  • Offer you the free time to live your best life outside of your business.
  • Allow your to do what they love most in your business– usually design new products and work on collaboration, not the other stuff (filling orders, inventory, making the same best sellers over and over and over…)

I know what it’s like not to be able to find business or marketing advice for artisanal business. It’s frustrating!

Artisanal businesses are very different from other product based ecommerce businesses. It ruffles my feathers to see marketing gurus and business coaches claim that their methodology works for all product based businesses, because in my experience they don’t. 

I acutely remember spending $4k on a marketing program that I was never able to use. It took us 10 months to pay the program off and another year for me to trust myself enough to invest in another marketing program I desperately needed. I just needed the right one.

In my third year of business, I searched for a woman who had built a 7-figure artisanal business without start-up capital, and in alignment with my values, to mentor me. I didn’t find her. And that’s part of the reason I do what I do now, but there’s more to it than that. 

READ EXACTLY WHAT I DID IN MY FORMER BUSINESS

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My love for artisans stems from my heritage.

My grandmother is on the left 

I remember walking down the steep and narrow streets from my grandparent’s apartment in Barcelona to the local shops, and my mother telling me in Spanish, “This is where one buys yarn. Here, fountain pens. This is the best shop for Espadrilles. There’s another one if we don’t find your size, but this one is better.”

I was 8 and I couldn’t believe there was an entire shop dedicated to pens. 

These stores were very mysterious to me. Small, the size of a European hotel room, dark inside to escape the heat, and every inch, (or should I say, centimeter) covered in inventory– thousands of pens, jewelry, leather journals, hats, or whatever specialty items we happened to be in search of that day.

Each shop felt magical. Hidden secrets wafting from the manufacturing equipment and the raw materials behind the counter. I sensed the owner's expertise bubbling below the surface, only presenting itself with the customers that knew enough to ask the right questions.

It was obvious to me that I did not know enough, but that summer I decided to learn.

Partly because of their magic and partly because my grandmother, green-eyed and fiery-spirited, was one of those artisans.

Unlike my mother, my grandma grew up in Torrevieja, a small fishing town in the south of Spain where locals whistle the letter “s” through their teeth. Orphaned at 13, the youngest of 12 siblings, and with a second-grade education, she followed an older sister to Barcelona only months before the Spanish civil war began.  

She found work at a tailor’s shop and learned the craft. After she married my grandfather, she opened her shop. When she eventually closed the shop, it was to stay at home with her children. But she never stopped creating. 

Even as the macular degeneration left her eyes nothing but shapes and shadows, she could feel the textures of yarn, so she crocheted.  

I watched her make a little holder for the pocket radio she listened to every afternoon after lunch and before her nap, and I learned crocheting, embroidery, and cross-stitch during those humid summers in Spain.

And, especially for artisans, it’s a burning desire to do, create, imagine, concoct. It’s something that builds and builds and must get out – whether your medium is gold or linen or bull hide. 

a few years ago

A few years ago, I went back to Spain and those specialty shops were gone. They’ve vanished over the years. The buildings still stood but instead of the local dressmaker’s boutique, there was a Zara with fluorescent lights and polyester dresses made in Indonesia.

Shoes are rarely ever made in Spain anymore. They’re made in China, assembled in Spain, and created to look like a Spanish artisan’s work. It’s the same story around the world. When you visit Tulum and see all the Mayan artisanal crafts and goods, they’re made in China too.

The Intimacy Is Gone.

Around the time that I left my former skincare business, I wasn’t able to articulate all of the reasons I wanted to continue working with artisans. I took for granted my love of unique, high-quality, hand-made goods. I honestly thought everyone knew the magic artisanal products hold. The soul-deep connection humans share when they experience each other’s creativity. 

Don’t get me wrong, I shop at Anthropologie, Cost Plus World Market, and of course, Ikea. (God bless Ikea.) But chains like these haven’t quelled my desire for artisanal goods. I still crave products born from the inspiration of the person whose hands crafted it – an authentic expression of their essence, refined by their years of experience. 

Because that’s pure magic.

Artisanal products carry unique energies that FUEL MY SOUL and breathe richness into my life.

I want to live in a world with many, many artisan businesses, like the streets of Barcelona were in my childhood.

And I want artisans, especially women, to learn how to make enough money to live the life you want while making what you love.

I want you all to have the knowledge and skills to feel comfortable building a business on your terms so that you don’t have to do things that don’t feel right to you just for money. And I want you to be bringing in over 6-figures a year.  Because that offers freedom!

The creator's gift is being able to take a CREATIVE MOMENT in time and transform it into an ETERNITY of JOY for someone else.

I invite you to bring your creativity, your joy. 

 

There are no starving artists. Only those who are not yet awakened to their worth.

Your gifts are valuable, worthy, and you are the only one who can create your brand of magic.

 Elena

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