Building a Resilient Small Business - An Interview with Jena Hounshell
Caster extraordinaire
Small business owners are a wild bunch. We often take big risks, make leaps of faith look like routine choices and we scare ourselves regularly. I often think of how much we are allowed missteps, failures, and mistakes as business owners, all in the name of learning and advancing. This was certainly true for me in the early years of running my business.
Enter Jena Hounshell.
This isn’t the first time she has appeared somewhere on this website, and it won’t be the last. 6 years ago, I moved into a studio space in a building in downtown SF with two studio mates.
We moved into a building that houses a hefty chunk of the Bay Area Jewelry community including, at the time, a one-woman casting powerhouse who would go on to help me transform my work and ultimately my business.
Jena has a way of patiently dropping knowledge bombs right into my head when I need it the most. I would carve a wax, or fabricate a piece and then walk it down the hall to ask innocent questions like “is this castable?” Jena would almost never say no outright. Her answers were gentle but direct. “You can cast this if you change where this texture goes” - or- “this is castable if you completely rearrange this design”. Her feedback in the early years of my wax experiments (Waxperiments?) made me better at wax carving and better at designing, and she helped me find ease in my work.
A student in Jena’s mold-making class last September cuts open a mold under Jena’s guidance.
One of the many things that I’ve appreciated about her over the years is her commitment to the artists that she works with and to helping all of us craft the best work that we can. Get to know her a little more as she answers these three questions and please give her a warm welcome. Learn more about how her work and ethos inform how she runs her business.
How did you start doing what you are doing?
I run a one-person precious metal casting shop in the Bay Area. A friend once described me as a Xerox machine for metal. I am either helping artists make multiples of their favorite designs or I'm transforming a design that was originally made in an alternative material into metal. My customers include local designers and retailers and I am truly lucky to work with such a creative bunch.
After I graduated as a Fine Art major from the University of Washington I started working at a company in Seattle called Outcast & Co. It was a precious metal casting shop in a high rise building a few blocks from the Pike Market.
The owner of Outcast, who I now call my mentor, taught me that working with your hands in manufacturing is really alchemy between imagination and problem-solving. He taught me how to anticipate problems and solve them creatively. How to tweak a design to make it cast better, how to read a casting to determine proper metal temperatures, how to read crystal formations on the metal, how to make a tool that you don't have but need. And the goal was always to help artists manifest a vision they had; to help make their concepts and projects become a reality.
I moved through all of the stations of the shop until I was in charge of the casting room. Every step of the way my mentor allowed me to make mistakes and showed me how to fix them. Every failure I had in his shop was an investment he made in me learning the craft.
“My mentor taught me that if you want more pie, don’t take slices from other people; make the whole pie bigger. ”
When I decided to open my own casting shop in San Francisco I originally pitched the idea to him of him opening a remote location in SF that I would run, but we decided that it would be messy for him to manage it long distance. I decided with his blessing to go it alone. I literally had less than $500 to my name and was living at my parent’s house. I bought some used casting equipment on Craigslist and started playing with it at home.
I endeared myself to a local coin shop that would advance me metal bullion for every casting order I took in. One coin at a time. I rode my bike around the city picking up work and delivering jobs. I spent time in my customers' studios and met their family members.
I depended on word of mouth marketing and knew that those referrals depended on me being trustworthy, dependable and fair. I worked 3 part-time jobs in the beginning and slowly over the first year quit them one at a time until I was fully self-employed. I am now celebrating 8 years of full-time self-employment.
In the last year, my partner and I have built a workshop in Sonoma County and I moved my business into this facility in January of 2020.
What is the best advice you have received about business?
JH: My mentor taught me that if you want more pie, don't take slices from other people; make the whole pie bigger.
The network of businesses I am a part of depends entirely on our individual successes, so I try to support the businesses I work with as much as I can.
That ethos permeates many of the guiding principles in how I interact with my clients, my vendors, and my competitors. I strive to allow open dialogue with customers so I understand their needs and I try very hard to make sure their designs succeed. I intentionally share as much information as I can with clients and other vendors.
I don't see other casters as competitors and love posing questions or providing answers to the hive mind. To avoid jeopardizing my own business I intentionally surround myself with makers and manufacturers working under the same principle. I'm currently reading "Building a Better Business" by Ari Weinzweig which is so full of amazing practical business operating advice, but I am very aware that I am reading it through the lens of knowing that the business culture that I embrace and aim to create is one that makes the pie bigger.
“I’m excited to see people take a more active role in inspiring each other to be creative, resilient and productive. ”
What is exciting you right now?
JH: Technology in manufacturing at this moment in history is pretty exciting. Computer-aided design tools including 3D printing and 3D scanning are prolific in the world of makers and designers.
It's exciting to see the effects of that technology on the design process, and how that technology is allowing more people to be designers. Community maker spaces have gained popularity as artists look for more resourceful ways to have access to this equipment and I see a lot of results of the cross-pollination that these spaces encourage. I run a pretty low tech shop that employs techniques humans have used to pour metal for hundreds of years, but it is so cool to see those same techniques relevant in a world of such new technology.
I don't think CAD can replace handcraft and I don't think handcraft can exist anymore without CAD. It’s exciting for me to see myself as a bridge between these two methods and to observe the changes in the kind of work that comes through my shop.
There is a lot of uncertainty in this era of the pandemic, but there are also silver linings. I have been so encouraged by how more people everywhere are asking "what can I do to help." Specifically, in my industry, I am excited to see our interdependence becoming more apparent and as a result, our networks becoming even stronger. I'm excited to see people take a more active role in inspiring each other to be creative, resilient and productive.
