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All images in this post are from Beth Casey, and used with permission.
What do you think of, when you think of an “indie business?” And what do you think of when you think of a “corporate business?” I think that our community of small, independent craft businesses tends to think of anything “corporate” as being in some way soulless, perhaps evil, and definitely not worth emulating.
Well, my guest, Beth Casey of Lorna’s Laces, has a very different take on “corporate.” Lorna’s Laces is, in fact, a corporation – a small one, with just six people who work each day to produce and ship hand-dyed yarns to yarn stores all over. Beth and her crew espouse all the indie values you’d expect from a one-person craft business, but by working together in a larger organization, they’ve been able to accomplish a lot.
So when is “corporate” not so “corporate”? And do we need a better term to describe businesses like Lorna’s Laces? Have we reached a point of maturity as a business community where we might need to start thinking a little bigger?
This interview should give you lots of food for thought.
Indie/Corporate Links:
• The Lorna’s Laces website will show you all the yarns the crew makes together.
• You can get another window into the company via the Lorna’s Laces blog, where you can read Beth’s original post on Indie vs. Corporate.
• …And here’s Lorna’s Laces on Facebook, Twitter, and Ravelry.
• We also had a bit of discussion about “indie” vs. “corporate” on this here blog a while back.
• If you’re a CraftyPod subscriber, you can also get this podcast about The Basics of Business Structure.
I think in the food world the term “artisan” is used to talk about small batch type businesses. That may be a confusing term in the art/craft world, though, but it’s the same kind of concept. I appreciate that there’s a difference between creating locally and importing and re-packaging imported goods.
I think this is a really interesting topic. I am currently a very small one person business, but I do hope to someday grow into a larger business. Not huge, just bigger, kind of like what Lorna’s Laces did. I still want to have that indie personal feel though when I get there. I think that is one of the reason’s small indie businesses are so appealing. You can meet or talk to the artist and have a more personal one to one transaction. And also know you are supporting someone local.
I tend to think of “indie” as a privately owned small-medium size business, and “corporate” as medium-large sized business owned by stockholders or yet another corporation. Can an indie business be a corporation? Sure – all that means is how the business is organized, usually for financial, tax and liablity reasons. At an indie, the relationship between owner and employee is much closer than that in a corporate environment.
So in my mind, Lorna’s Laces = indie, Michaels Crafts = corporate (even though they are not stockholder owned, I think anyway).
[...] 4. What is Indie and What is Corporate with Beth Casey - Craft Leftovers is actually sponsoring this podcast on CraftyPod so you should all go check it out and give Diane some love! [...]
Interesting question to ponder. I’m a one woman business dyeing yarn in my basement. It’s my full time job, and most of my sales are at fiber festivals. I’ve been thinking I need to transition to more wholesale. The shows are exhausting, and there’s no way I’ll still be able to do them 30 years from now (I’m 47 now), and some of them are really expensive. I’d like to hire a few employees eventually, once I have enough money coming in.
I think of indie as independent company. It doesn’t have to be just one person. An indie band isn’t just one person. It’s a band. But corporate conjures up images of guys in suits and stockholders. Aren’t there different kinds of corporations though, LLC vs, the more traditional kind? Whatever you call that?
There are indeed, but their definitions have to do only with legal liability and how accounting is done – not with anything philosophical.
There is a movement afoot to develop “B Corporations,” which, according to their website, “are a new type of corporation which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.”
http://www.bcorporation.net/
…And a corporation does have stockholders, but it’s not always in the “mega-corporation” sense you may be thinking. My partner and I, for example, have incorporated our businesses, and we’re the stockholders in that corporation. Which is a very different thing from, say, that mythical story of corporations doing evil things to please their stockholders. (Though this does, of course, happen in the world.)