This is my story.

I started this company in 2013 while completely broke, on welfare and food stamps, and pregnant with my son.

My morning sickness and inability to lift heavy boxes lost me my job at a print shop. With a baby on the way I quickly settled for the next job I could get - Target, with an hourly rate a third less than what I had been making before. After the holiday season, I was laid off at about 5 months pregnant. I tried finding another job, but nobody wanted an expecting mama.

I was grateful to have the unemployment from my print shop gig, but it wasn’t much. I gave up looking for work and focused on my health and sanity for once. I found peace and joy in making dream catchers—not the tacky, neon colored ones—mine were in tune with nature, reminiscent of their origins. I started with natural found and foraged materials, glass beads I had leftover from long ago, and clearance bin yarn.

Soon there were too many for our tiny, one bedroom apartment. I started my meager little Etsy shop and listed my first dream catchers.

I did have a couple sales from strangers, and my family were kind enough to buy some of those earliest dream catchers from me as well. This gave me the ability to buy some more interesting feathers, and some crystals! My excitement for creating catchers doubled when I got my hands on some beautiful gemstones to use!

Eventually I worked my way up to buying crystals wholesale, and had so many that I ended up selling the excess, but with the profits, I bought more crystals! This was the accidental beginning of a long, repetitive pattern of buying and selling crystals (And admittedly keeping a few). At first it was just to get more of them for my dream catchers, but it wasn’t long before I was buying pieces that would clearly never hang on a dream catcher. I was hooked.

Rewind back to my print shop days. Before I was pregnant, I was a complete mess. I dated awful guys. I drank too much and slept too little. I worked all day and partied all night and never stopped for long because I didn’t want to think about it. I wasn’t using my English Degree. I couldn’t find a “real” job that sounded bearable. So when I took the pregnancy test, my life was flipped upside down. I couldn’t smoke or drink or party. I couldn’t take the meds that I relied on to function. I could barely work! I struggled with the future and I struggled HARD with anxiety. One day I was at my best friends’ apartment and I ‘borrowed’ a small Herkimer crystal from them. I wasn’t into crystals, magic or anything woo but I saw it and I just felt like I needed it. It made me feel calm, comforted even. The crystal never made it back.

So here I was, many months later making dream catchers, and my only experience with crystals was this one, special crystal that I carried with me. Other than that I hadn’t given them any thought. Later here I was, obsessed with them! I was online reading about them, how they form, how they get different inclusions, how pseudomorphs occur, I wanted to learn it all. Hell I wanted to buy them all! And so crystals slowly grew to be part of Kouva in a big way.

I never planned to start this business, I never had much of any plan at all except to get by. I spent a lot of time reading, not only about rock formations and inclusions and locations and how to tell the difference between this and that crystal, but how to get a business license, how to open a business bank account, more tax law than anyone would ever want to read, how to be self employed without completely losing your shit in general! And I did most of this during my son’s first couple years worth of nap times. I learned as I went, made a ton of mistakes, learned many things the hard way, and spent a lot of nights working until two or three in the morning. It wasn’t easy or painless or fast. But we made it off of assistance years ago, and that was really hard- you only had to hit the poverty line to lose it. But it was a very proud moment in my life to be off the government’s assistance and on our own.

No matter how bad things seemed, or how hard things got, or how impossible the future looked, things were always okay. Everything happens for a reason. The scariest, hardest things that happen in life are often the first chapter of the best yet to come. Scary indicates new. Hard means you’re growing. When things seem to be at rock bottom, look up! Because that’s where you’re headed. Up and onward to bigger and better.

Now we have a lovely little home of our own, I married my husband and he gets me coffee. I have two wonderful employees. I am so eternally grateful to have gotten here doing what I love and sharing my passion with the world. This business and this life are more than I ever could have imagined or hoped for us when I listed my first dream catchers in 2013. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, for being here. Thank you for supporting small businesses.