Cheerleading People's Creative Expression - with Heather Givans

December 10, 2025·1 hr 19 min·5 clips

Heather Givans turned literal trash into a best-selling fabric skew that's been produced for years.

The question is simple. Heather talks about creative expression as one of the rare adult places where the making can matter before the thing becomes a gift, a product, or anything useful. Sam gives that idea room. Then the story settles into Heather's world at Crimson Tate, which comes across less like a store machine and more like a place built to help people keep making. It feels lived in, in the best way. The business lessons are not shiny little advice nuggets. They arrive through headbands, fabric strips, craft fairs, wholesale calls, and the odd math of making small things again and again. Heather's Harriet headband begins quietly. She is in Northern Minnesota, sewing for craft fairs, using the long strips left after trimming quilts for binding, and turning those scraps into tubes that can become headbands. Then the orders start jumping. Kristen Cohn, who owns Silver in the City in Indianapolis, asks for twelve, then twelve more, then a hundred, then five hundred, and eventually holiday quantities around twelve hundred at a time. It is funny because it sounds almost absurd. It is also the point where a sweet small product stops behaving like a sweet small product. Now there is labor, timing, helpers, wholesale trust, and a rep carrying the thing around. The accountant sees margin. Heather sees the people and effort sitting underneath that margin, including how everyone near her gets pulled into the making once demand outruns the original pace. Sam catches the craft-world truth in it. This is not a neat creator-success story. It is messier and more useful than that: experiments, scraps, relationships, and ordinary persistence. The ending gets soft without getting syrupy. Sam and Heather talk about the less polished reality behind the Instagram version of craft work, where people are trying hard and sometimes just barely getting the thing landed. Nobody sounds jaded. They sound stubbornly loyal to the reason they are there: helping other people keep a creative practice alive.

As heard by us

A grounded look at making art, selling it, and keeping the community part intact.

Heather Givens' story lands as a clear look at how creative work turns into a business without losing the work itself. The path runs from early sewing experiments to the Harriet headband, then into wholesale orders, a rep with a secret suitcase, and a quilt store that feels like…

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Why you'd press play

A candid maker-business story about one handmade headband turning into wholesale orders and a store built as community in disguise.

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