Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Berkeley.
Amanda, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
The Quilting Bea in Massillon, Ohio, is owned by a mother-daughter duo: Judy Lattavo (Mom) and Amanda Lattavo Berkeley (Daughter). In December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Judy showed Amanda her latest completed collage quilt wall-hanging and she was lamenting the fact that her long-time local fabric source was relocating and decided not to carry fabric once they move. Judy said, “If I were 10 years younger, I’d open my own quilt shop.” To which Amanda replied, “Well, you’re not dead yet, so let’s do it – I’ll quit my job (as a Corporate Controller) and open it with you and take care of all the systems, inventory, and bookkeeping.”
Two weeks later, they had a plan, a name, became incorporated in the State of Ohio, and obtained their vendor’s license, and Amanda started to learn all she could about quilting. While Judy had been sewing and quilting since she was a little girl, Amanda had never sewn more than a pillowcase at best!
The Quilting Bea is a play on the name Beatrice which encompasses the hand-quilting spirit of their maternal quilting lineage: Bertha, Judy’s mother, Bertha’s three sisters Myrtle, Lillie & Beulah, and their mother Mira (Ma Beckham). The sisters used to send their quilt tops to Ma Beckham to be hand-quilted, and after Ma’s passing, the sisters themselves came together for a few weeks each summer to hand-quilt all of the quilt tops they had finished in the last year. Together, they represent the shop owners’ ancestral quilting bee; Beatrice, The Quilting Bee, was designated as the shop’s mascot, logo, and nickname for the shop ~ and so, The Quilting Bea was born.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Amanda was determined to have a system that was integrated for both the brick-and-mortar shop as well as full online services. Judy wanted a more old-fashioned personal feel to the shop. Amanda was able to find and learn a system that could satisfy everything they needed for her purposes as well as instantaneous inventory management, and the system provides an old-fashioned register “ring!” with each sale completed.
When the ladies first opened the shop, using just the lobby of a former modern church that had been out of business for a few years, they had less than 200 bolts of fabric filling the bookcases, so they supplemented with cartonnage boxes and books to fill the empty spaces. Soon, though, they were buying more IKEA bookcases and pushed into the Sanctuary, transforming the space into what it is today: Classroom, shopping, strategic displays, and a stage for the 26″ Gammill Statler Longarm, an industrial quilting machine they purchased in the Fall of 2022.
They biggest struggle has been advertising because it’s not as simple as advertising in the local newspaper – no one gets a paper anymore! So social media, word of mouth, and strategic roadside signs have helped bring new customers to the shop every day. Amanda has learned SEO and other tech-based tricks to help push online sales, which have taken off in the last six months. Specialized classes and personalized service, along with longarm services, have solidified their place in the quilting cotton retail space in Northeast Ohio and the world wide web in just two years!
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
What makes our shop different from most is that (1) we personally select each bolt of fabric or pre-cut that comes through the door. Our expertise in color theory helps customers cross-design collections and think outside the box. Modern, bold, bright, and funky fabrics are what you will find in the shop, with some sweet, muted collections from the UK. We specialize in Collage Quilting classes, patterns, and kits, as well as Cartonnage (French box-making) kits, two crafts that use fabric in very different ways. Cartonnage is a completely sew-free art, so it’s great for the non-sewers who find us! Judy started working in Cartonnage around 8 years ago, and Amanda quickly joined alongside her.
We love giving everyone the space to breathe and SEE all of the fabrics we have. We keep our showroom spacious and colorful, with fat quarters cut for all of the yardage and our longarm machine and projects on display at all times. Our goal is for people to walk through the door and immediately feel HAPPY that they stopped in.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
The most important lesson we’ve learned is give it a shot! Have a new marketing idea? Try it out! Think a new kit could be a hit? Make it up and see who buys it! You don’t know what you don’t know, so there’s a first time for everything, and you learn and grow from all of it! We try to repurpose kits or marketing items that don’t work the first time into something else; sometimes just changing the perspective changes customers’ responses.
Also – owning your own business doesn’t mean you only work when the shop is open. It is a 24/7/365 days a year constant. You don’t clock out at 5:00, you’re always working on the books, a newsletter, a new class schedule, or looking at new collections that won’t even ship to you for six to 9 months, but you always have to plan ahead for tomorrow while you navigate today!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://TheQuiltingBea.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beatrice_the_quilting_bea/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheQuiltingBeaMassillonOhio
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thequiltingbea
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-quilting-bea-massillon?osq=the+quilting+bea
- Other: https://goo.gl/maps/upFgrzc6P56NSjKW7
Image Credits
Amanda Lattavo Berkeley
