Inglorious Crafters
Eve Vandalsen jumps from display to display at her tent for the annual Crafty Bastards fair in bustling Adam’s Morgan. Dressed in a light white t-shirt for the unusually warm and sunny October afternoon, she hawks her own handmade leather goods. One particular clutch in shades of rust and marigold catches a customer’s eye.
“That bag is so you!” Vandalsen, 35, squeals to a young, curly-haired customer. “I saw you looking at it and was like ‘Please let her get it! It matches her outfit!’”
Vandalsen keeps chatting with the customer as she fills out her receipt with a dark blue ballpoint pen, peering over the edge of her oversized retro tortoise-framed sunglasses.
Today is Vandalsen’s first time showing at the craft fair, or anywhere in Washington, D.C. She moved to the city in May from Detroit, where she worked as a dietician.
“I’ve been doing this for ten years, but the economy was so depressed out there it just made sense to move,” Vandalsen says. “My husband got a job here.”
Vandalsen is part of a growing trend in today’s economy where women are looking to second sources of income to make ends meet. But instead of waiting tables or logging hours in retail, some are using this new economic reality to flex their entrepreneurial and creative muscles. With the growing success of Internet businesses, many even wind up with financial and personal fulfillment from these endeavors.
In 2008, the National Women’s Business Council estimated that women made up 47% of the United States workforce. Furthermore, more than 3.5 million women were self-employed, which added up to more than one-third of all self-employed individuals. Susan Galbraite, 55, says it makes sense for these two groups to overlap. As the co-owner of Looped, a yarn store that opened in DuPont Circle six weeks ago, she says she’s a living example.
“I have a background in social work, and I used to run a rehabilitation program for women who were just released from prison,” Galbraite says. “I’ve done that for nearly 30 years, but I’ve always wanted a good local yarn store, and I love knitting and crocheting, so I just went for it. The public response in this economy has been very good. I think people really still want to support local businesses.”
But becoming an entrepreneur on top of a second job, or even getting a first job, has not always come easily to American women, regardless of economic times. For instance, at the start of the Great Depression, while professions like medicine and law still boasted the engorged salaries they do today, women only accounted for two percent of the workforce in each profession. In fact the jobs permissible for women had not changed much since the 19th century; many women worked as servants or in forms of domestic work. It wasn’t until World War II broke out and American men went abroad to fight in Germany and Japan that women began joining the labor force in larger numbers. Someone had to be on hand to keep the boys fighting and the country running, why not the opposite sex?
Women gained more financial validation for their work with the Equal Pay Act of 1963. The law, aiming to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, sought to eliminate gender-based wage differences. Unfortunately, what was signed into law on paper hasn’t always manifested in practice, as women still make an average of 76 cents to every dollar made by a man.
By the 1980s, the tide seemed to be turning for many women in the professional world. More than half of women with children were part of the work force, and women as a whole accounted for 45 percent of working Americans.
With the evolution of the Internet came the evolution of a new way for women to literally be their own bosses. For instance, etsy.com, which labels itself as “a community” of people buying and selling handmade products, boasts “hundreds of thousands of users” in more than 150 countries worldwide. And of the 145 people etsy.com currently employs, 51 of them are women. The majority of them work in “Support” or “Business Operations” (cleverly known as “Biz Ops” on the company website).
“Everyone has to have an etsy account these days,” vendor Minda Merinsky, 26, says. Her booth is filled with old-fashioned blenders, lamps and even a waffle iron from the 1950s, all of which she has remade into functioning lamps. “It’s how I’ve gotten the word out about my work, since it’s some of the more eclectic stuff in the bunch.”
In fact, etsy.com was how Vandelsen got the word out about her leather goods before she ever set foot in Washington. A growing business online has lead to a growing business in person.
“It’s actually been really good,” Vandelsen says. “I’ve been lucky enough to even raise my prices on a few of the items.”
As the afternoon wound on along a loud and crowded 18th street, customers could treat themselves to a whole array of “eclectic stuff” in the bunch of Crafty Bastards vendors. A newly opened Halloween store featured its gory costume makeup by dressing all the workers to look like the undead: sallow white skin, bloodshot bags under the eyes and all. One tent offers “living jewelry” in which small plants actually grow out of wearable ceramic pendants.
But many of these vendors had a common thread. As people left their booths they heard farewell greetings of “Please take my card! It shows you how to get to my website and my etsy page!”
Vandelsen is no different; she has her cards in a business card carrier that she wrapped and decorated in teal and lavender leather herself. The card does not make any reference to her experience as a dietician and a long-time worker in public health. Instead, it simply reads: Eve Vandelsen’s Leather Goods.
“I started this business as a way to make ends meet from my other job,” Vandelsen says. “But if today, someone were to come up to me and say ‘Don’t quit your day job,’ I’d probably have to show them these bags and say ‘This is my day job!’”
