Car­ol Quash

Cro­chet­ing is a skill in which the av­er­age young per­son may not be in­ter­est­ed, but 18-year-old Aliyah Pope has turned it in­to a busi­ness. Un­der her brand Tia­Hooked­It, she crotch­ets swim­suits, pants, shirts, hand­bags, hair ties, buck­et hats, key chains and a num­ber of oth­er items, which can be or­dered from her on­line store.

“I main­ly make clothes, but I can re­al­ly make any­thing. I have even cro­cheted socks once,” the Ari­ma res­i­dent told Busi­ness Guardian.

So far, beach wear is her best sell­er, as it tar­gets the de­mo­graph­ic to which she be­longs and fits in­to a mar­ket she knows all too well.

She said ap­prox­i­mate­ly four years ago, she de­cid­ed to learn how to crotch­et prop­er­ly, and spent hours look­ing at YouTube videos and de­vel­op­ing her skill through tri­al and er­ror.

Pope be­lieves her love for cro­chet­ing may eas­i­ly have stemmed from its in­flu­ence in her child­hood days.

“There were a lot of peo­ple around me do­ing it when I was grow­ing up, and it was some­thing I al­so tried. My grand­moth­er used to teach me the dif­fer­ent meth­ods.”

When she was sat­is­fied that she could pro­duce items that were of com­mer­cial stan­dard, she went in­to full busi­ness mode. She pur­chased a man­nequin to dis­play her clothes for con­tent, and oth­er pieces of equip­ment to en­hance the look of the space, as well as sig­nage to high­light her brand.

“It was an in­vest­ment for con­tent pur­pos­es; to make the space look nice.”

Then she bought her ma­te­ri­als and tools—yarn and cro­chet hooks—all of which were sourced lo­cal­ly, and she be­gan her small busi­ness jour­ney. Tia­Hooked­It, she ad­mit­ted, is still find­ing its way, but she is cer­tain things will pick up.

“It’s still a young busi­ness, but I know I have very good prod­ucts.”

On an av­er­age, one of her off-the-rack swim­suits would cost TT$250. Cus­tom-made items, de­pend­ing on the com­plex­i­ty of the work, could cost a bit more.

The or­der­ing process, she ex­plained, is that cus­tomers can DM her with the items from her cat­a­logue they would like to pur­chase, stat­ing the pre­ferred colours and size, and make a 50 per cent non-re­fund­able down pay­ment. There are no re­turns or ex­changes un­less items ar­rive dam­aged or there was an er­ror in or­der.

“They pay the bal­ance at pick up or on de­liv­ery, and we keep cus­tomers up­dat­ed through­out the process.”

In time, she would like to ex­tend her tar­get au­di­ence past its cur­rent de­mo­graph­ic of young men and women.

“I don’t want to be known for on­ly clothes, be­cause, as I said, I can cre­ate a lot of oth­er things as well.”

Pope said she may be still very young, but she has an un­der­stand­ing of the needs of the more ma­ture mar­ket. So her plan is to make things such as such as doilies, cro­cheted valances and oth­er dec­o­ra­tive house­hold items which she knows will at­tract that de­mo­graph­ic.

Cur­rent­ly, she mar­kets her prod­ucts on In­sta­gram and Tik­Tok. But when she ex­pands her cat­a­logue, she will use the Face­book plat­form to ex­tend her mar­ket­ing reach. At some point, she said, she wants to open a phys­i­cal store, where peo­ple who pre­fer to see and touch the prod­ucts be­fore they com­mit to a pur­chase can come in and do that.

She sees a lot of sales, mar­ket­ing, and net­work­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties in the up­com­ing Christ­mas sea­son, when she plans to show­case her prod­ucts at the many pop-up events that take place around the coun­try.

“As I said, it’s a new busi­ness and I have to put the brand out there where peo­ple can see it and be­come fa­mil­iar with it. My mom used to sell chil­dren’s clothes, and she used to do a lot of pop-ups, so she will guide me,” in terms of which events will be suit­able for her tar­get mar­ket, and which ones will be most like­ly to have a lot of foot traf­fic.

As a young woman, she be­lieves there are nu­mer­ous pro­fes­sion­al op­por­tu­ni­ties for her on the busi­ness hori­zon, but be­fore she con­tem­plates any oth­er move, she wants to en­sure that Tia­Hooked­It is in a place where it can stand on its own, and pro­vide em­ploy­ment for oth­er peo­ple.

“Right now it is just me do­ing every­thing, and I know in time I may not have the time to do it all.”

But by then, based on her busi­ness pro­jec­tions, there will be oth­er cre­ative hands at the hook.