The idea for Core Fabrics didn’t just come from my own personal desire for more conscientious craft consumption… it came from our community and our needs as a business. Every day our customers write to us asking for advice about fabric, tools and supplies, and at Closet Core, we often found it challenging to source a wide range of unique and eco-friendly textiles to highlight the potential of our pattern designs. I could envision an online shopping experience that married all of these needs, a place that combined our passion for design, sustainability, sewing education, and gorgeous fabrics all in one place.
Eventually the vision grew so demanding I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I realized that if I ever wanted to sleep again, I needed to figure out how to make this dream a reality. Enter Tereska.
Tereska: You sent me a text message.
Heather: Not the best way to change your life, I’m sorry. Did I have you at hello?
Tereska: I was making dinner for my kids and you asked me if I wanted to quit my job and run a fabric store with you. I ended up burning dinner.
Heather: We’ve been best friends since we were fifteen, listening to Tori Amos, reading Leonard Cohen poems and dressing like bedraggled hippies. Remember when we bought that building together and tried to be landlords for five years? We were in our early twenties and had no idea what we were doing. I still remember gouging a hole in the floor with the sander when we were trying to DIY our entire apartment.
Tereska: Or trying to figure out how to snake a drain when someone clogged the pipes. So many weird adventures!
Heather: And then you got married and we sold the building and went back to being *just* friends again. That was a bit of an adjustment for me, but I never forgot what a killer team we made.
Tereska: We have strong complementary energy. You have big ideas and I love figuring out how to execute them.
Heather: I think we’re kinda soul mates.
Tereska: Don’t tell my husband.
Heather: Oh, he knows. I think you’re allowed to have more than one soul mate.
Tereska: We ended up talking later that night and you sketched out the entire vision to me in five minutes. I studied fashion design and worked in costume for TV and film for years before creating a sustainable urban agriculture start-up with my husband. I had recently left that business to pursue a job in tech, but I missed the scrappiness of entrepreneurship and leading a team. I couldn’t sleep that night at all. The next day I told you I was in.
Heather: I might have cried. I got so attached to the idea of Core Fabrics but I knew there was no way I could do it without you.
Tereska: How could I say no? We get to be work wives again, and we’re building this really exciting sustainable business model. The fun part for me is discovering this new industry and figuring out how to implement a progressive and ethical strategy for product sourcing AND team building. We’re learning so much and getting better every day. Even though we both have a lot of experience running businesses, this is all new to us, so it kind of feels like we're re-inventing the wheel sometimes. We’ve made a lot of mistakes already, but it’s been so much fun to learn and grow and do this with you. I am so excited to see where we can take this.
Heather: I love you. I’m so happy we’re doing this together.
Tereska: Me too. Now let’s get back to work.
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