The Point Being: Local businesswoman Theresa Delaney talks COVID-19, small biz response

In the past two weeks, “The Point Being” podcast has played host to some of the Arizona Daily Star’s most talented news reporters and they’ve been updating listeners on developments surrounding COVID-19 and its spread in Pima County.

For this episode we wanted to know more about the impact on local business and our producer Edward Celaya reached out to Theresa Delaney, the co-owner and founder of Creative Kind, “a place for people to gather, connect over creativity, and make or discover something beautiful,” according to the shop’s website.

With its La Encantada storefront currently closed and a business model based primarily around face-to-face interaction, Delaney sat down to talk about how she got her idea off the ground, what has changed for the business in the last month and what assistance the business has received.

You can listen to this and other episodes in their entirety on our website, or at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Question: What is “Creative Kind”?

Theresa Delaney: We’re essentially a mix of experiential- and inspiration-based retail, so we carry a lot of local makers, a lot of paper goods and gift items, but we also do craft and DIY workshops. You can come in and learn how to do a macramé wall hanging or floral arrangement or watercolor or hand lettering, with the purpose being of gathering people together in a space to interact with each other in person, face-to-face.

People also gather inspiration from other small businesses and makers and find things that, if you’re not feeling necessarily creative on your own, you can support the creativity of others and share it with your loved ones through gift-giving, or through even just getting things for yourself to have around your home.

Q: With your La Encantada storefront closed, how has your business changed to adapt to an almost exclusively online market?

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Delaney: We had a small online presence for selling our workshop seats, but really didn’t have a very robust e-commerce platform. We were really built around our purpose and our mission to bring people together face-to-face.

So how do you take that very intentional, curative experience from being in person with people and bringing them into a meticulously designed atmosphere and take it online and give them that same or something close to it as far as a meaningful experience through an online platform? That’s been our small challenge to tackle.

We’ve had to really quickly adapt and change our event format to online, doing Zoom events and changing our pricing structure to account for the inability to provide all the materials for events. A lot of our makers are not producing right now, so getting inventory— not getting inventory — is a challenge. It’s been an interesting balance of “how do we know if people are shopping or what they’re looking for?”

So adapting to that over the last few weeks has been interesting. It’s just different shopping trends than when people are coming in person. But we are getting all of that online and we’re still working through a lot of kinks with our e-commerce and with doing so much more shipping than we were previously.

But for the most part, we’ve been improving that online presence, getting our e-commerce products listed and the details up, and just keeping in touch with our community and making sure that they feel connected to us still.

Q: Have you received any sort of federal assistance or state aid?

Delaney: Absolutely. So we are applying for everything just like everyone else, We applied for the EIDL, which is the Economic Impact Disaster Loan, and we did get the advance for that, thankfully. We’re hoping that it’s an indicator that more money will come. We got the application for that one in really early. It was pretty easy. They asked for operational costs and reports and things like that, and that money just showed up in the bank account last week.

So we got really lucky. There wasn’t a lot, but I’ll take what we can get at this point. Then we also applied for the paycheck loan. We didn’t get into the first round, like most small businesses, but it seems like there’s definitely wheels turning to get more funding approved for that.

So we’re holding out hope that we will get some funding from the paycheck coverage as well.