Today we’d like to introduce you to Jess Nicoles
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
J. Stark started eleven years ago in my husband’s living room. He’d been working in tech and craved a career where he made physical objects with his own hands, so he dipped his toe into wallet making. Eventually, I came on board and we expanded our line to mostly bags, including totes, backpacks, crossbody bags, and duffles. We’ve been extremely nomadic in our eleven year history, first spending time in two different workshop spaces that were mostly hidden from the public. Eventually, we opened our first retail space on the corner of Coming and Cannon Streets in downtown Charleston. In 2020, when our landlord decided to sell the building, we moved up to King Street and spent five years watching the landscape change on Upper King. at the beginning of this year, we moved up to Park Circle to seek out a neighborhood vibe yet again and have been loving it here ever since!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It absolutely has not been a smooth road. I don’t believe it ever is, in retail. We were catapulting toward our biggest year ever when a pandemic struck us down straight out of the sky, so goodbye meteoric rise! And since, the days and months and years have had such drastic ebbs and flows that it’s hard to know what a real year even looks like anymore. We’ve discovered that constantly pivoting–taking on custom work for restaurants and completing large corporate gifting orders–can help us get over the tougher hills to climbs until the good seasons come back around again. And we love what we do,–we love seeing how people’s faces light up when they find just the right bag–so we keep chasing the dream. If we can add even a glimmer of joy to the world, then we’re doing something right and we’re going to keep chasing that feeling!
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We are a small team of talented creative folks who create bags and leather goods in a hybrid retail and workshop space. You can almost always find someone working on the very bags that are available for purchase in our shop. We specialize in tote bags, backpacks, and travel bags, as well as leather goods like wallets, keychains, and clutches. We strive for simplicity in our designs (I love the motto “never put a pocket where a pocket doesn’t belong”) but we LOVE color and texture, so you’ll always find something fun and beautiful being used in the creation of the bags, like up-cycled Velvet swatches from West Elm, or repurposed vintage military fabrics, in addition to our everyday canvas, waxed canvas, and nylon materials. I’m particularly proud of how infrequently we need to repair our products, and I’m even prouder that if anything goes wrong, we’ll always fix it. We vastly prefer to keep our items out of a landfill and in your possession for the long haul.
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
We’ve found that if someone really inspires us, we’ll just ask! And we’ve done it countless times.–asked someone to mentor us. We love drinking in the knowledge that more seasoned makers have to offer, even if it’s not in a similar medium to ours. Every life experience can translate into a lesson for someone else down the road, so the more you hear and the more questions you ask, the more likely you are to be prepared when a road bump comes along.
Pricing:
- Our bags range in price from $50 to $500, and small leather items can range from $12 to $150
Contact Info:
- Website: https://starkmade.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jstark/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/starkmade/
