Transcription of Alaina Marie Harris, creator of Alaina Marie for the show Love Maine Radio #309: Clayton Rose + Alaina Marie Harris
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Today I have with me, Alaina Marie Harris, who is the creator of Alaina Marie, a collection of bait bag inspired clutches. Alaina also recently partnered with Keds to create two nautical themed sneakers for the brand’s Ladies for Ladies Collection, a series that highlights female makers. Thanks for coming in.
Alaina Marie: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s exciting.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, it’s exciting for me too. You’re doing some really interesting things with your creative self.
Alaina Marie: Yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: How did you get involved in being a designer?
Alaina Marie: Well, from a young age I’ve always loved art. I spent my college years concentrating in drawing. I went to school for art and entrepreneurship, so I always had an art kind of background. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but over time it kind of evolved and morphed into my love for design. Yeah, I went to school determined to make a career doing something that I love to do and I can proudly say that I am living that dream today.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You are from South Portland originally.
Alaina Marie: Yes. Born and raised in South Portland, so I’m a Mainer at heart forever.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Where did you go away to school?
Alaina Marie: I actually went locally, USM, so didn’t go very far. Yeah, I love Maine. I really think it’s a great state and has a lot to offer. It’s got so much going on. You’ve got the Four Seasons. You’ve got Portland, which is such a great city especially for an artist and designer like me that it’s such a welcoming place for me to do what I want to do.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me about art and entrepreneurship. It’s an interesting combination.
Alaina Marie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: We often think about these starving artists.
Alaina Marie: Yeah, exactly. It actually worked out, it’s on the timing. I went to school. I actually started my career as a nursing major, because like you just said, I was afraid that I would be a starving artist. I was like, I can’t live my life doing art or design, especially in Maine. I wasn’t really interested in like going high fashion, like going to New York City or Boston. Really like my heart is here. I knew that about myself.
Yeah, I went to school for nursing, figured that was a practical career. I knew I could make money doing that, but very quickly realized it was not for me, first semester even. I didn’t even last a full year and I was like I’ve got to change my major. So I switched to art as a backup thinking that I’ll just finish my first year doing art until I decide what I really want to do.
But four years later I graduated with art and entrepreneurship. My sophomore year was when USM offered this new program, which was art and entrepreneurship, so I was like, “Hmm, maybe if I did that then I could have some business background and I figure out how to market on my skill, my craft, my trade and make a living doing it.” It was kind of a risk, but I was like I don’t know what else to do, so let’s just do that. Yeah, it’s worked out really well. It’s just kind of a testament just like if you just stick to your passion, do what you love, the rest will kind of unfold itself for you. I truly believe that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: What types of business things did you learn when you were going through?
Alaina Marie: The program is set up, basically it’s like an art major with a concentration in a business minor, so just the basics really. I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, it’s something… When you’re in that classroom setting learning about business and how to run a business and how to market yourself and all these things, for me at least it was hard to conceptualize what it would actually look like because I didn’t have a business.
It’s just kind of like skills, just basic skills that I learned but didn’t really know how to input them until years later when I decided to start my business, which kind of happened accidentally, too. I feel like I’ve gone into this whole thing kind of blindfolded. Didn’t have a business plan, still don’t really have a business plan. I’m just kind of living my life on this journey and doing what feels right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: There must have been some I guess place of happy accident.
Alaina Marie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: If there’s another word for it, I’m not sure.
Alaina Marie: Absolutely, yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: But whereas somehow what you were doing met up with what people were looking for.
Alaina Marie: Right. Once I graduated, my kind of plan was to sell T-shirts. I wanted to have a T-shirt business and put my artwork onto t-shirts. I taught myself how to screen print so I could do them myself. I really love the process. I love the design process. I love making things with my hands. I think there’s a special element to that. That was kind of my plan just to do the T-shirt thing.
One day I saw this bait bag. I had no idea what a bait bag was. I don’t know any lobstermen. I didn’t grow up lobstering, but I discovered this cute little carrier is how it kind of translated to me, and the colors they come in are so bright and fun that it just caught my attention. I had this bait bag and I’m like, “Hmm, this is really cute. How can I use it? I can use this for stuff. I can put my stuff in. I can put my makeup in or use it for the beach or whatever, just like accessories.”
So I put on my creative hat, and like I said, I was screen printing at the time, so I went to a marine store and I got a bunch of other like marine materials that fisherman and lobstermen use for bait and fishing and stuff. I took all this stuff apart and kind of redesigned it into my first clutch. It’s, again, something that I just kind of took off doing. It was like a weekend project and I made this really cool handbag and that was it.
I figured okay, this was a one-time deal. It’s just something I wanted to do. Let’s keep doing the t-shirt thing. But I was using my handmade bag and got a lot of attention on it, a lot more than my t-shirt. I was like, “Okay, maybe I could make a couple of more, like perfect them a little bit.” I spent the next month or two working on this bag and figuring out how to produce them. Honestly, the rest is history.
I put my first collection, if you will, up on Etsy and when I made my first sale, I knew that I was like onto something. Just that feeling was indescribable. It was such a compliment and it was exciting and it really gave me so much motivation to make this work. So yeah, that was three and a half years ago.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: How did you move from bait bags to Keds sneakers?
Alaina Marie: That’s the cool part about my job. I love what I do because I never know what to expect in a day. Every day is completely different. I have a store on Fore Street and at the time, that’s where we were also producing all the bags, making them there and selling them there, so you could see the whole process.
Two summers ago, the creative director of Keds walked into my store, Holly Curtis, and she was asking for me. She introduced herself and I was like, “Wait, so you work for Keds, like the sneaker company?” She’s like, “Yeah, we’re based out of Massachusetts, and I actually live in Portsmouth and a couple of the girls and myself, we have your handbags and we would love to talk to you about pairing up and doing a collection of sneakers. We love your story. We love your concepts, and the look of your bags and yeah, we want to work with you.”
That was like amazing. Two years ago, I was only a year and a half into my business. I’m still figuring things out today, so to have such a big company come to me and ask to do a huge project like sneakers, like I’m not a sneaker designer but I got to design shoes. That’s why I don’t have a business plan because that wasn’t part of the plan but it just happened, and such an amazing opportunity. Yeah, so it’s cool.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you think that it helped you to not be into lobstering or fishing when you first looked at the bait bag and said, “Oh, that could be something else.”
Alaina Marie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Because you didn’t know what it already was.
Alaina Marie: Exactly, I do. I think it’s kind of everything, because I feel like when you know a lot about something, it’s very easy to get tunnel vision and just to think of that one thing in a specific way. Me as an outsider coming in and just not even knowing what this product was, I just liked the look of it, the materials, the feel, the texture, the color.
So thus as a designer saw the potential there and yeah, I was like, “This could be a great bag.” If I were a lobsterman or grew up baiting bags every summer, I probably would be maybe even repulsed by it and just like I never want to see a bait bag again. So yeah, I was able to come into the situation as a non-biased point of view and yeah let my creativity go.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Did you work in retail ever?
Alaina Marie: Yes. I worked in restaurants for a while through college, and then after college, I worked in retail for not very long. Restaurants is primarily my background. I did that for like 10 years, like worked my way from busing tables up to waiting to bartending, and then when I was trying to start my T-shirt business, got a part-time job at J.Crew because I love that store. Yeah, that was my stint in retail, so I got a taste of it but never thought I would have my own store someday, let alone my own business.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: That’s also interesting, because there are many people who are doing stuff online through Etsy the way that you started out.
Alaina Marie: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: But a lot of people don’t translate that into a storefront, which has its own set of unique challenges.
Alaina Marie: Yeah. I love having a store because it is a physical place for me to present myself to my customers. They can come. It’s kind of like a home base. They can meet me. They can feel the product, see the product. I don’t know. I love being local too. I love the fact that we’re handmade, Maine-made, local. I think it’s important for me to have a store.
Again, it wasn’t part of the business plan. I just figured I would just make some bags maybe just sell them online, it would maybe be just a part-time thing, but things grew so quickly that yeah, I really wanted to have a store. I think working in retail and in the restaurant industry, which is a huge customer service line of work really set me up well to be able to run a store, because I’ve got those skills like I love dealing with customers and helping them out. It’s kind of natural to me. I started busing tables when I was 15, so it’s been that long. Yeah, I just love it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: What are some of the things that you’ve learned from having a store? Because the store when you have a storefront, you are also managing people because you want to have that best level of customer service.
Alaina Marie: Yeah, it’s definitely a big responsibility. It’s not just like oh yeah, let’s open a store, which it is that. It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work. I feel like I almost have three jobs. I’m a designer, I run the production side of things. We have a separate facility in Scarborough. We just moved into this beginning of the year because we’ve grown so big.
We weren’t able to make the bags in the store anymore because it’s too small, so I have a store, I’ve got the production facility. Yeah, so I have to run that, manage six different people now. We’ve grown a lot since last year. I’m juggling, every day juggling. I go into work and like I said earlier, never know what to expect in a day, but I love it. It helps my ADD. I never get bored ever. I don’t even know what that feels like anymore. So yeah, it’s a huge responsibility, but it’s fun.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: How do you keep your creative self going?
Alaina Marie: It definitely comes and goes. As a creative person, it’s something you can’t force. I can’t force myself to be creative. I try to every day, if not every day at least once a week, do something for myself that lets me be creative to keep it going, whether it’s doing a sketch or browsing on Pinterest. I have this wall in my office that’s just like full of swatches and inspiration. So things like that, I also love having my production studio, because I’m very hands-on.
I love taking raw materials and creating something out of it. So oftentimes, when my staff leaves for the day, that’s my time to be creative. I’ll get these ideas in my head and I have so many sample bags that I haven’t launched yet, but it’s just fun for me. That’s my creative process. Yeah, that’s how I keep going in that department.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You’re kind of making sure that you have protected time essentially.
Alaina Marie: Absolutely. I think it’s crucial because with everything going on, running a store and running a staff and keeping up with the accounting and all the business side of things, I feel like there’s a fine line. It can be almost dangerous to a creative mind because it can be overwhelming.
Naturally, the creative side of things is where I’m most comfortable. The business side of things is where I’m still learning things every day. So yeah, it’s important for me to stick to my roots and keep the creative side going because to me that’s the roots of the business. If there was no creativity or no product, no designing happening, then we wouldn’t even have a business. So yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Did you do art when you were in high school or younger?
Alaina Marie: Yes. I’ve got portfolio after portfolio of just collections of things from when I was growing up, all the way through college. Yeah, I think it’s funny to look back. I could have picked an easier major because I was always the student who had canvasses and portfolios and pads of paper and paint everywhere and easels and so much stuff in the dorm room or wherever I could fit it.
Then when I started screen printing, my roommates after college probably wanted to kill me because I would screen print in the kitchen and have all these things and inks everywhere, but that’s me. I love that. I love having … I’ve always had a craft bin. From very young, drawing was my thing. I loved to draw things and painting and that kind of, it’s like classic art to me. Yeah, I just grew up doing it. I still have that instinct.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: With all of that, and now knowing where you’ve come, how was it that at any point you said, “Oh, I should be a nurse”?
Alaina Marie: That was definitely fear. It was because I was afraid that… Not even that, it was I didn’t think that I could do something for “work” that I really like to do. I thought work had to be something that was work, and my work now doesn’t ever feel like work. I mean, it’s a lot of work, but there’s a difference. My days fly by because I love what I do versus if I were a nurse, it’s just not in my nature. Some people are so good at it and those people are amazing, but for me, just not my thing.
Yeah, I thought I had to go to school for something like that, because I knew it was a guaranteed career, like a guaranteed job. Going to school for art, there’s no real guaranteed artist job. If there is, they’re far and in between. So I thought that a nursing degree would be a good security deposit on my life kind of and yeah quickly discovered that I just can’t force it. I’m just going to do something I like and figure out the rest later. That’s kind of how I work. I work backwards. I’m not a great planner at all, ironically. Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you have people in your family who are in practical careers like nursing?
Alaina Marie: No. Actually, my father is an entrepreneur. He has his own business, so I grew up with that mindset and living that lifestyle. My fiancé now is an entrepreneur, so it’s very helpful for me to be around those people. Both of them are very inspiring to me, and every day push me to be better. They have their own very different businesses, but I can still see how a business is run and how they do things, and they deal with their customers. It’s all the same kind of background. Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: That’s still really interesting that nobody else told you that you needed to do something practical.
Alaina Marie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Your father is an entrepreneur, and you hang around with entrepreneurs and yet something inside of you, whatever it was, I don’t know was it people around you were all being practical or?
Alaina Marie: Back at the time, yeah. A lot of my friends going off to school were going to be teachers or nurses or going for science or those classic things, and I’m just like, “Well, I guess I should go on that boat, too.” At that time in my life, I was so much of a follower. I really was. I wasn’t very confident in myself and I just felt like I had to follow the crowd.
At that age, if you had told I would start my own business and have a store and be in charge of people, I would have never believed you. I would have laughed and been like, “I can’t do that.” But yeah, going through college when I got tired of like nursing is painful, I can’t do it. So I’m like all right, let’s just go back to basics here. What do I love to do? Like I said, I’ll just figure it out later. Yeah, here we are.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I think you’ve already said it, there are some people for whom nursing or practical careers of any sort are very well suited. They’re very good at them, it’s in their nature. It just kind of makes sense.
Alaina Marie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: But there are actually a fair number of people that I believe go into things that are “practical” especially in this day and age, where we have student loan debt that’s incredible. So everybody is saying, “Well, get the most out of your education, and in order to do that, then take this straight path”.
Alaina Marie: Exactly, exactly.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I wonder how much unhappiness that that creates in some people, not everybody.
Alaina Marie: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: But some people maybe who are more like you, who have other things that they like to do, but they’re not really sure what that looks like yet.
Alaina Marie: Right. Going to school for nursing, I would have paid the same as I paid for my art degree, but there is, I guess on paper, a better chance that I would have gotten a job and been able to pay for it than going to school for art. It’s tough. It’s a lot riskier to graduate and be able to find something. There’s no guarantee that okay, I’m going to go to school for art and open my own business someday selling my art. There’s no guarantee that that’s going to work.
Going to school, being a nurse, getting a degree in nursing, there’s definitely a need for that. There’s something to be said about that. Yeah, it was risky, but I had my… I kind of in the back of my head was like, “Well, I can always bartend.” I always had that in my back pocket, but I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life either.
Graduating from college and even going into college, there’s so much stimulation. It’s this whole new phase of your life. There are so many choices to be made and yeah, it’s just like what path do I choose? So there’s a lot of pressure and I definitely felt that pressure, but yeah worked through it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You said you’re not really a planner, but I would guess you’d have to have some planning skills in order to have kept all of this going.
Alaina Marie: Yeah. I’ve become a lot better at planning and organization. I still am not the best planner, but there are certain things like I have certain standards like, I don’t know, like I have a business to run. Yeah, there’s got to be some element of planning in there. I’m employing people and we’ve got customers, we’ve got orders to get out the door every day, so there are deadlines. So I guess I’ve become one, kind of been forced into it. I’m a procrastinator by nature, but I’ve learned to overcome that, and I’m still learning it. It’s still something I’m learning.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It’s something that I think about a lot because we all believe that, or many people believe that they’re going to go get their education, come out, and be 100% trained to do whatever it is they’re going to do for the rest of their lives, but there’s no way that you could have known a, what you were going to be doing, and b, what you would have needed to know.
Alaina Marie: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Most of us are going to continue on learning and kind of teaching ourselves.
Alaina Marie: Yeah, exactly. There’s no handbook for life. You can learn all the basics in a classroom, but kind of like what I said earlier, I didn’t think or know how to apply those business skills I was learning to something, because I didn’t have a business. Now that I have a business, I can see so much further into it and I’m learning a lot more.
Going to school is great for learning the basics. It taught me how to teach myself how to do stuff, so it definitely set me up for those skills but yeah, I’ve learned so much more now after school. Just being out in the real world, there’s nothing like real world experience and that’s why I think internships are so great.
When I was in school, I was required to do one internship, but it wasn’t really a thing. Now I feel like you have to have like three of them to graduate, which I think is awesome. Get that real world experience. We have an intern now working at Alaina Marie, so it’s great. It’s cool. She’s got to see all the sides of the business, the retail, the production, the online, shipping, design, everything. Yeah, now she can go back to school maybe thinking of that kind of model in the back of her head while she’s sitting in her business operations class, stuff like that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Is there also a creativity to the business side?
Alaina Marie: Yeah, it’s definitely an art in itself. Not everybody can run a business. Some days I’m like, I don’t even know if I can do it. It’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s not cut out for everybody. I like to say it’s a lifestyle, because I am married to my business. I do it all day, every day. It’s always on my mind. I never clock out, but you have to love what you do. That’s a big reason why. Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I encourage people to go down to your store.
Alaina Marie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Also, to look you up online.
Alaina Marie: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Hopefully they would be inspired to get an entire Alaina Marie line to proudly wear out into the world.
Alaina Marie: Love it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I have been speaking with Alaina Marie Harris, who is the creator of Alaina Marie, a collection of bait bag inspired clutches. She also recently partnered with Keds to create two nautical themed sneakers for the brands Ladies for Ladies Collection, a series that highlights female makers. I wish you all the best, and I am really glad that you decided to go with what made you happy.
Alaina Marie: Yes, same here. Me too, I’m living my best life right now. So thanks for having me.