Listen: How Chereen Leong Schwarz Turned a Hobby Into a Business

Chereen Leong Schwarz started knitting as a way to decompress after long, stressful days as a head chef. Today she's the owner of Smeeny Beanie Knits, a handmade knitwear company in Steamboat Springs. We spoke with Chereen about how she turned a hobby into a side-hustle and eventually into a successful, quit-your-day-job business. 

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Meet Chereen Leong Schwarz

Chereen launched Smeeny Beanie Knits in 2018 as a side-hustle, while she worked as a head chef in Steamboat Springs. Today, Smeeny Beanie Knits is a successful handmade knitwear business that uses ethical and sustainably sourced fibers. She donates 1% of all revenue to Protect Our Winters and the National Park Foundation. In this episode of the Startup Colorado Podcast, we chat with Chereen about how she transformed her knitting hobby into a business, the joys of being a solopreneur, and what "success" means to her. 

Transcript

Chereen: Hi, Margaret.

Margaret: Hey, thanks for having me.

Chereen: Yeah. Thanks for coming. Come on in.

Margaret: Oh, and who is this?

Chereen: This is Aria.

Margaret: Hi Aria.

Chereen: She’s my little sidekick. She's a little deaf six year old healer mix.

Margaret: I follow Chereen Leong Schwarz into her apartment. Outside the sunshine is blaring white, but inside her home, it’s softly lit and very cozy. It’s exactly what you’d expect for a craft business icon. 

Chereen is the owner, maker, and designer behind Smeeny Beanie Knits, a handmade knitwear business in Steamboat Springs.

Chereen: It's an eco-friendly knit beanie business where everything is handmade by me.

Margaret: She has big chunky cable knit beanies with Faux Fur Pom Poms and slouchy hipster hats.

Chereen: So, this is… it's kind of a fair isle design, so multiple colors. This is called the Yampa beanie. So, I named it after our Yampa River. It's a Celtic cable for those who understand knitting…

Margaret: These are so pretty…

Chereen: Thanks…

Margaret: We’re standing in her spare bedroom that’s wall-to-wall boxes of colorful wool yarn and plastic tubs brimming with the beanies. I love it. You can just feel the creativity and potential. It makes you want to make… something.

Which is actually kind of part of her brand, inspiring and helping others turn a hobby into a side hustle and maybe even a full-time business.

You see, starting a knitting business wasn’t exactly Plan A for Chereen.

Margaret: So you are a chef by training, what type of restaurants did you work in previously?

Chereen: I grew up in California, so when I went to culinary school, it was very focused on farm to table.

Margaret: When she arrived in Steamboat Springs, Chereen landed a job in a fine dining restaurant.

Chereen: And at the time, they were, you know, really experimenting with foams and gels and all the molecular gastronomy type stuff.

Margaret: It was sexy and exciting, but really hard work.

Chereen: You're in the restaurant by like sometimes nine or 10am, and you're working through until midnight, a lot of the time. And you know, in the early days, it was like awesome I’m learning so much. I’m a young, bright eyed, bushy-tailed chef… like burgeoning chef…years go by, and you're like, this is not sustainable. I never saw my husband, I never saw my friends. You're basically working all of your holidays, your weekends. And, you know, sometimes only one day off, you know, especially later on when I was a head chef.

Margaret: She was getting really burned out.

Chereen: I was just realizing that I didn't even really want to cook, or I was trying to just go through motions, and at that point, because food has always been something so important to me and something I was so passionate about, it actually scared me. Like so much because I was like, am I losing that?

Margaret: So, she started knitting, just as a way to decompress after work.

Chereen: With knitting, it was like, you can see the stitches come to life and then become something almost not instantly, but just, you can watch it happen, and see that progress unfold. So, that was A) motivating in a weird way, but also just passive and meditative. And I could either be really focused on the knitting and like doing some intricate stitches, or I can just knit something really simple and just really let myself relax, and, you know, fall into it.

Chereen: I was a late bloomer with Instagram, like, I got my first I started my account in 2016… and I was like, oh, they have those hashtag things, you know, I should do that. But anyway, so I made a post with my beanies in it. And I got so many comments, it was like, are you selling beanies? Like, are these? You know, can I buy one? And you know that first, what, like you would pay me for this, like, this is just something I really liked to do.

Margaret: A friend turned her onto Ohana, a boutique in Steamboat Springs that sells locally made artisan goods.

Chereen: So I brought them a few hats, and they really liked them. And they're like, okay, cool, we'll carry them. So, that was the first winter where I was like, okay, here we go.

Margaret: Now, Chereen is still working full-time at the restaurant. And despite having knitting as an outlet, she’s just getting so burned out that finally, she decides to quit and takes a job at a local farm.

Chereen: I like to think of the farm as a something that I really needed in life, and something that really taught me a lot. But also like that transition job where I didn't have to work full time hours, I could still make enough money to live on,b ut it also gave me enough time freedom to really work on and nurture my business. So, that's kind of when I started really gaining some traction with Smeeny Beanie Knits.

Margaret: She started an Etsy store where she sold patterns for her beanies first, then the actual knits. Once that was rolling along, she built a website and started selling product directly from there. And all along the way, she’s building the Smeeny Beanie brand.

Chereen: Instagram was a big part of my growth, especially in the last two years… I think a lot of things have changed on Instagram recently. For a lot of people in the small businesses it’s been hard for sure, but it really was my main marketing source. As well as I have a newsletter, or, you know, email list. And so, between those two things, that's kind of where I marketed everything.

Margaret: During this time, Chereen also starts a farm to table private chef business called Wilderbean Provisions.

Chereen: So, I was kind of juggling the job at the farm, both side businesses, and eventually I got to the point with both of those that I was like, if I was able to put 100% of my energy into both of my side businesses, what would happen. And so, like I was saying earlier, I gave my notice, and I was like my last day on the farm is going to be March 18, 2020. And everything shut down on the 15th, and I was like, okay, here we go.

Margaret: Suddenly, Chereen became the owner of not one, but two businesses. I wonder, how she juggles it all?

Chereen: I look at it like levers, especially with the burnout, I've become really conscious of, like, preventing that from happening again. And so, with both businesses, it almost has helped me where I can push harder on one lever if I need to, and pull back on the other if I need to, and, you know, really just make it work for my life. And in a way, that's kind of what what I enjoy about being a solopreneur. I don't have anyone depending on me. That being said, if I don't do anything, then nothing happens.

Margaret: It took a little while, but eventually she found a balance. And not just a balance between her two businesses, but a good balance with the rest of her life.

Chereen: I think also with business, people seeing gross and having a better year than the year before, and you know, all that kind of thing is a definition of success. But to me, it's for me, especially with the burnout, it's been time and having free time and being able to take time away, and letting the guilt go of that. I struggled with that for a little bit, letting go of that guilt.

Margaret: As we start to wrap things up, I ask Chereen if she has any advice for other makers.

Chereen:  Just start, like, just start because you can plan all you want, you can, you know, go through all of these, you know, classes and courses. I think there's some people that just take course after course and whatever, but put those things that you learn into action, you know, do something because you're going to learn so much more from just diving in and like getting started than you would from anything else. And I think it's follow your passion because, you know, if you do something that you love and are passionate about, it'll kind of lead you in a direction that you might not even know you would ever have been. I never in my wildest dreams would have thought I have a business at all, let alone two businesses and if someone told me back in the day that knitting would become my full time job, I would be like are you serious, so yeah I would say just start.