Multigeneration entrepreneur Catherine Fox has always enjoyed arts and crafts.
“I wanted to be creative in my freetime,” Fox said. “My family and friends were always encouraging me.”
Fox spent much of her life working on her family’s farm where she learned about sales and customer service. As a teenager, she took an interest in jewelry making and sold her wares at a farm stand.She turned her passion into an entrepreneurial venture in 2009 when she launched www.eclecticdesignsbycatherine.com as a platform to sell not just her jewelry, but paintings, drawings and other crafts.
As she continued to get further into jewelry making, Fox sought to learn more through tutorials on YouTube. After finding a lack of quality content, Fox decided to start a YouTube channel to showcase her own tutorials. She posted her first video tutorial on memory wire bracelets and received an overwhelmingly positive response.
Today, she has over 30,000 followers and her most popular video has over 800,000 views. Her videos garnered the attention of top jewelry suppliers and she has since partnered with allfreebeadedjewelry.com, pandahall.com and favecrafts.com. Although launching Fox’s venture didn’t require much capital, she invested her time into completing the YouTube Creator Academy program, where she learned how to effectively market on YouTube. She also bought a high quality microphone and built herself a computer that would meet the needs of her business. But her best move, she says, has been being open to change.
“It evolved very quickly,” Fox says. “YouTube is very different from when I started.” Fox learned to make her videos entertaining, as opposed to strictly informative and says she tries to listen to what people want.
Fox intends to launch a full jewelry making course for beginners sometime within the next year. As for the long term? “I want to continue to do this when I am a stay-at-home mom,” says Fox.
Catherine Fox
EclecticDesigns by Catherine
www.eclecticdesignsbycatherine.com
Fox is a senior at GVSU, double majoring in Human Resources and Marketing with a minor in Studio Art.
NEU 