Purls of wisdom: A Crawford teen uses her skill with needles to raise money for overlooked kids
Photo/Leslie Bowman
Eleanor Fisk discovers her entrepreneurial insights by selling scarves to raise money for social service agencies
Eleanor Fisk doesn’t see herself as much of a businesswoman. Instead, the 14-year-old Calais High School sophomore has her sights set on a career in medicine.
But she has instinctive entrepreneurial characteristics, enough to craft a business plan that brought dozens of children’s books to two northern Maine social service agencies and to capture the 2011 Entrepreneur Award from Hardy Girls Healthy Women, a Waterville-based nonprofit working to empower girls.
Eleanor launched Scarves to Stories last year, selling her hand-knit scarves and using 75% of the proceeds to buy children’s books for Stepping Stones, a statewide social services agency for single parents and their children, and The Next Step, a domestic violence project in Washington and Hancock counties. Moved by the missions of the two groups, Eleanor wanted to help, and a pile of scarves she knit in her spare time provided the opportunity. “My aunt taught me to knit when I was 7 or 8,” she says. “I would just do it while watching TV and I had a bunch of scarves stacked up.”
The “bunch” became inventory. Eleanor made up fliers that she distributed to family and friends announcing her one-of-a-kind creations were for sale. She priced them according to “what was reasonable,” she says, depending on the intricacy of the design and the size of the scarves, plus what the market would bear. Most of the scarves are priced between $10 and $20 and Eleanor estimates she’s sold close to 40 so far.
She donates her time (two or three hours per scarf) and securing her raw material is not a problem. “We have tons of yarn in this house,” she says with a laugh. The money she’s earned through the sales purchased board books for babies at Stepping Stone and a variety of readers for children at the shelter. “I thought the children at those places might not have much of a chance to have their own books,” she says. Eleanor selected books she loved as a child (anything by Eric Carle), believing that books she enjoyed would hold the same charm for this generation of readers.
Megan Williams, executive director of Hardy Girls Healthy Women, says the organization created the entrepreneur recognition to change common perceptions about girls’ interests, skills and contributions to community. Eleanor was a perfect fit. “Many young people who start a business for themselves often do so with the end goal of purchasing something for themselves, such as driver’s ed classes,” she says in an e-mail. “This is great, but as a nonprofit we also see the value in young people learning early on that donating to others is also an important part of the business world.”
Eleanor says she is still accepting orders, but she’s unsure whether she can continue Scarves to Stories next year, when, as a high school junior, she’ll start applying to colleges as a pre-med major. Although she can’t envision herself as an entrepreneur once she finishes her education, she did learn some valuable lessons from her stint in business.
“You have to keep really good track of everything,” she says. “You have to write everything down. I had all these scarves and matched up prices, but it was all in my head. I realized pretty quickly that everything had to be written down or there was chaos.”
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments