Pandemic pivot: Métis woman goes from learning beading to making it her full-time job in a year
COVID-19 is pushing some Manitobans to start their own business
Jessie Pruden learned how to bead because she was very bored during her COVID-19 quarantine.
In June 2020, she was stuck at home attending virtual classes at the University of Winnipeg — she'd gone back to school after a knee injury ended her nearly 20-year career in the restaurant industry. Looking for something to do and hoping to reconnect with her Métis roots by learning the craft, she ordered a beading kit.
One pandemic year and many YouTube tutorials later, beading is now her full-time job.
"I ended up practising about 12 hours a day, every single day," Pruden recalled. "Then, as I was making pieces, my friends were messaging me and asking if they were able to purchase them."
She made an Instagram page to show her friends her beading progress and started to get a lot of followers. When the order requests kept coming, Pruden realized she had found a new way to make a living and her earring business, Bead 'n Butter, was born.
"Bead 'n Butter has completely changed my life," Pruden said. "I wasn't getting hired anywhere, I wasn't making any money, and I was a little bit worried about what life was going to look like. And then suddenly this happened, and I was able to pay my bills, and I was able to put food on the table. And it's just such a relief."
The knee injury — long-term physical strain from being in the service industry — made walking difficult, and returning to work in that field impossible. The pandemic only made finding a part-time job while she was in school harder.
Pruden is far from the only one to make a pandemic-necessitated career change, and while small businesses continue to close due to COVID-19, the pandemic is also pushing others to be entrepreneurial.
More Manitobans becoming entrepreneurs
The Women's Enterprise Centre of Manitoba is a non-profit organization that helps women start or expand their businesses. It offers free one-on-one business counselling, and sells introductory business classes and seminars.
Demand is up compared with before COVID-19, says Colleen Krebs, WECM's manager of business services.
"We are seeing a number of people coming out of the work-life and into entrepreneurship, and a lot more people doing side hustles, as well," Krebs said, noting traditional jobs are no longer generating enough money for many.
According to the Statistics Canada labour force survey released on July 9, Canada added 231,000 jobs in June, but that growth was entirely in part-time work.
The landscape has changed, with people being downsized or losing their jobs, Krebs says.
"They're finally spending time developing that business concept that they've always had ruminating in their minds."
During the pandemic, WECM's classes have often sold out, Krebs says.
People are particularly interested in growing their businesses online, she says. It's a trend that the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) noted in its fall 2020 research series, which found that approximately 152,000 small businesses in Canada adopted e-commerce — or were in the process of doing so — since the start of the pandemic.
A January 2021 survey of 1,010 Canadian business owners, done on behalf of CFIB, implied the shift to online is permanent. Nearly half of surveyed businesses said they plan to increase or maintain their online sales post-pandemic.
For Pruden, online is all she has ever known. She operates Bead 'n Butter informally through Instagram.
Every Friday, she drops a mini collection of between 10 to 20 earrings — depending on how many she's able to make — and whoever messages her first on Instagram purchases it using e-transfer or PayPal. She mails the orders out the following Monday and opens up a limited number of custom orders each month.
She says a website is currently in the works.
Bead 'n Butter has become a family affair, Pruden says. When orders started picking up last summer, she taught her brother how to bead — only a month or two after she learned. Now, his girlfriend looks after the business's finances.
Pruden learned how to bead and run her business with the help of other local Indigenous artists, beaders and business owners. Now, she is trying to give back whenever possible, using her jewelry to raise money for the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and teaching low-income Indigenous youth how to bead for free.
She says she hopes learning the craft will help them as it helped her.
"Giving back to my community is of the utmost importance to me," Pruden said. "This community has embraced me and given me everything that I have."