We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Laura Martin Baseman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Laura, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Before I opened my yarn and fabric store, Hacer Santa Fe, I was a multi-faith hospital and hospice chaplain. Dealing with death on a daily basis changes your relationship to other problems. There have been no challenges in my retail business that are life or death. Failure is not death. I am glad to have that perspective when ideas I had did not work out or a project did not manifest. It is also something I can remind my customers when they are disappointed. Maybe a fabric they love is sold out or their favorite sweater got eaten by moths. I try to kindly point out that it isn’t the end of the world and hopefully we can find a solution together.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
My love for fiber crafts started when my godmother Manuelita Romero taught me to sew at the age of 10. I chose sewing as a personal project for my Nambé (Northern New Mexico) 4-H club and Manuelita was the only person in my family who could teach me. Ever since I was born she had made clothes for me, from my baptismal dress to the halloween costumes I wore every October. I loved watching her sew, and it was an amazing day when I found myself behind her 1980’s Singer, learning how to make something myself!
It was over fifteen years before I found myself sewing again, this time to de-stress as I finished my master’s degree at Harvard Divinity School and worked as a multi-faith chaplain at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Not only had I rediscovered sewing as a creative outlet, I also picked up knitting. One of my closest friends taught me to knit while we worked on our master theses and I have taken a knitting project with me wherever I go since!
As I did my rounds at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I noticed many patients brought fiber projects with them as they waited for treatments or recovered from procedures. In the Neonatal ICU, where I worked primarily, babies were given handmade quilts and blankets to cover their incubators. Everywhere I went, fiber crafts brought a bit more warmth and comfort into place that could feel harsh and sterile.
After returning to New Mexico, I worked as a hospital and hospice chaplain for a couple of years. But the health care industry and its continuous fluctuations did not feel like the right fit for me. Instead I decided to apply my ministerial skills to starting a fiber crafting studio in my hometown of Santa Fe. I wanted a shop where people could buy high quality natural fiber yarns and fabrics at a variety of price points and also a community space where people could take classes. So after a year of dreaming and scheming, Hacer was born in November of 2019.
Over the years, Hacer has become a self sustaining community of fiber and fabric enthusiasts. We just celebrated our 5th anniversary with big gathering at a local movie theatre, where we watched Spirited Away and crafted with the lights on. Hacer and my customers have helped me heal from the burn out I experienced after woking as a multi-faith chaplain. I’m grateful my healing has be co-current with developing a creative space for my community.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1) To learn the skills you aren’t good at or hire someone who has those skills.
One reason I was afraid of being a small business owner was because I didn’t know how to keep books. However, I taught myself enough that I have become a decent book keeper. I also hire a professional accountant to help me with my taxes every year and double check my bookkeeping. It’s important to know what your strengths and weaknesses are but not to let your weaknesses prevent you from achieving your goals.
2) You don’t have to be THE expert to help your customers.
Something that is common to local yarn stores is that we help customers figure out knitting or crochet problems. Often a customer will bring in a project they have been struggling with and ask us for help in figuring it out. When I first opened my business, I felt like an imposter because some of the people I tired to help had been crafting for longer than I had! However, by being honest with them when I couldn’t figure something out helped build trust with my customers. Sometimes we would watch YouTube tutorials together to learn a new skill or I would refer them to someone else in the community. And after having my craft store for 5 years, I have become an expert of sorts! I can solve many problems that my customers walk in with that would have stumped me a few years ago.
3) Have firm boundaries.
Most of my customers are wonderful people who I enjoy interacting with. However, we will get an occasional customer that will try to manipulate me or my employees. I have clear policies and communicate these to my employees so that they understand they can say no to a customer or that they can call me so that I can say no. The customer is not always right. You are not going to get a 100 bad reviews or get closed down because you stood up to someone who was being rude.
Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?
Besides a being a small craft store business owner, I am also a third generation newspaper kid. My grandfather bought the Santa Fe New Mexican daily paper in 1948 and started a weekly newspaper in Taos called the Taos News in the 1950s. My mother is the current owner and operator of the two media companies. As she ages, my younger brother and I are trying to learn how to be more involved so that these two older family businesses thrive for another generation. For me this means possibly selling my small business so I can take more of a leadership role in the papers. I want to become more involved in these older family businesses because I believe locally owned media outlets are essential. They help keep the public informed on what’s happening in their communities. Also, as much as I enjoy doing retail, I miss having the deeper community connections that I developed when I was a chaplain. Being a chaplain was all about listening to the stories of my patients. Being a newspaper means listening to the stories of the community. The challenge is going to be saying goodbye to the small business I spent years building. However, I think it is time to move on to a new challenge.
When I started Hacer, I was totally burnt out from being a first responder as a hospital and hospice chaplain. Starting my craft business allowed me time to recover and heal. Now I feel ready to put the skills I have gathered to helping my family’s older business grow and succeed.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hacersantafe.com
- Instagram: @hacer_santafe
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/laura-martin-baseman-84aa8542
Image Credits
Image 1: Outside of Hacer Santa Fe after a snow storm
Image 2: From left to right, Indigenous designers Candice English, Tressa Weidenaar, and Jennifer Berg at Hacer’s annual trunk show with Farmer’s Daughter Fibers for Indian Market.
Image 3: Local yarn dyer Daniel Mize of Rio Rancho, NM in front of his trunk show in Hacer’s yarn room.
Image 4: Celebrating Hacer’s 4th birthday at local coffee shop
Image 5: Close up of Hacer’s fabric collection
Image 6: A shirt sewn by Laura
Image 7: Laura knitting a sweater outside her family’s home.
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