A teacher & successful entrepreneur: Karen's Story | Founders Wisdom podcast with Karen Christians

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Welcome to another episode of Founder Wisdom Podcast. Today we have an interesting guest. Her name is Karen Christians. She is a jeweler, a teacher, writer. Karen, can you introduce yourself briefly?

Thank you, Charles, for this opportunity to join your podcast. I, I work out of Lowell, Massachusetts. I founded a jewelry school right out of college, but a very late bloomer in college. No, I didn't have a business plan. It's running about 20. It's running about 24 years now. It's called Metalworks. It's located in Waltham, Massachusetts. It's quite, quite a fun, you know, fun school when I, I live in Waltham, Massachusetts. My husband works as an engineer for Draper Labs and he really loves it there. And I've been in my home here in my studio in Lowell at Western Avenue Studios for about six years now. So really enjoying it. Teach out of here and I teach a lot all over. Wrote a book called Jewelry of Burning Man. So I've. That was. Came out in 2015 and now it's in about, it's gone in about eight museums now. So it's, it's done very, very, very well. Self published it put together the Kickstarter. Had no idea what I was doing. Lived in panic for 30 days while it grinds around. They're never fun, but it was fun. But yeah, it's been doing really, really well. And now I'm working on book two, which is Jewelry of Star Trek. So that's a lot of fun to do that.

So, yeah, very interesting.

Jewelry tools. That's the other thing I do.

Yeah, we may talk about that. Is it fair to say that jewelry is like your passion in crafting it?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it covers every aspect of what we know now is steam. I had a, When I was at Artisans Asylum, I started a jewelry shop there for teaching. And when I was at Artisans Asylum, there was a group from Tufts that came through and they wanted to do STEM research, of course, because it's a premier makerspace and all of that. And I said, well, you know, it's really steam. And they go, well, yeah, yeah. But it's not really about the art because the art really doesn't have anything to do with science, technology, engineering and math. And I said, tell you what, why don't you come over here and we'll sit down for free. And I will, I'll walk you through and have you make a, a ring for you to wear. And by the time we were looking at metal and metallurgy and how it heats and how it solders and how it roll, you know, everything they just said, okay, we're changing the program. It's definitely steam because they realize that, that you know, there is, there is not just the art you would sell from it or the art that is appealing. There's an art to really doing steam well. And if you both your brain and abilities to combining all of the aspects of stem in into steam, I mean that's, it's a real art to be able to do it successfully and have it come out clean and look, you know, look just those right little touches and we notice those touches. It's something that I've always appreciated. And when I lived in Silicon Valley years ago, I mean, that's when, you know, Steven Jobs was just, you know, he was in his garage and you know, there was something very different. That the way that a lot of other, the sort of growing computers were doing is just that there was an elegance and there was an art to way that he put it together. And I think that that's really been the, you know, the standard now of that company is to. Was what has made them, you know, so, so good.

And just to build these beautiful devices that are so simple to use. It's the arts and science question is kind of interesting. It's kind of right brain. Yes. Left brain. I believe both are very valuable. Being rational and being artistic, being creative. Yes. Doing the actual work, you know, I think both should be in equilibrium. And I was asking the passion question because most people in life, their work is not their passion. You know, it's not their ikiga. It's not what they were born to do, what they could get paid for. So do you sometimes realize that you're, you're kind of fortunate? Are you like often grateful to do what you do? Because a lot of people, they just hit the nine to five, you know, they do something they don't like. Sometimes they hate their boss. You know, I'm just curious to see your perspective on the whole thing.

I worked for a professor at Harvard for about eight years and I worked for other managers for other years and parts of biology. And I've always had a real interest in it. And the professor that I worked for at Harvard was very interested in, in circadian rhythm and bioluminescence. And it was a really incredibly fascinating subject to me. You're exactly right. It was still the 9 to 5 job. I wasn't a researcher. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't a postdoc. I wasn't a graduate student. I never thought when I was 40, that actually I could go back to college. That was something that just like, well, but I'm so old I couldn't possibly go back to college. And my. The story is, for me, is that how I got out of the nine to five thing, is that actually I was in a fire. I was in a very bad fire at a Halloween party, 1989, where somebody actually set me. Set my costume on fire, and I ended up in the hospital. Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God. That is.

Yeah. And so it's disturbing. Yeah, I was in the hospital for a month, and, you know, I had skin grafts in the back of my legs. And it was. It was a terrible, terrible experience. And about three to four months after I got out of the hospital, I said I needed to do something that was cathartic and something that would be fun for me. After I'd gone through this whole thing, I said, you know, I really love jewelry. I'd love to take a jewelry class. I'll take a class over at Cambridge center for Adult Education over in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I walked in, I was just like, oh, my gosh, it's so exciting. And all these tools. And then I stared down and went, oh, my goodness. You have to use a torch in order to make this. Oh. So that was. That was me coming to sort of together with the fact that now I had to hold this torch in my hand and I was making a tiny, tiny band ring, and I had a little silver band ring, you know, and then I had to join two pieces together with a little bit of solder. And I said to my teacher, don't go anywhere. Sit right next to me. Just walk me through everything I'm supposed to be doing. I'll drive it, but just, you know, and by the time that little. As you move the torch around, it heats up the metal enough for the solder to. Intermediary solder to. To fill in. I watched this little slip, stream of solder, and it was just my everything. It was like the world stopped. It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. I created alchemy. I had made two these pieces of metal joined together by this process. And literally from that, I never looked back. And it was three years of adult ed. And then finally I said, you know, the thing I'm missing about this is the art. Because there's a part of me that really wants to get this sort of hidden spot of art out. And so I applied to Massachusetts College of Art as a freshman or no, as a sophomore because of my board of Attempts at college, trying to figure out what to do. And they took me and I flew through the entire program. I graduated with the, you know, high honors and it was just. It was just a great experience. And then the next after I graduated, you come into this really tender time. Okay. And what I'll do is I will. You know, I'm thinking of teaching. And so I went right into teaching right after that.

What was the step between. Was it between teaching and entrepreneurship? When was the time that you said, okay, I'm going to fly by my own wings now?

Okay. So as I started to teach there, I started a program at the Cambridge center called Directed Open Studio. Opportunity to be able to sit down and if they've missed a class, which very happens often when you're trying to take a class at night and you're busy and it's so many weeks. One thing that I wanted to give them an opportunity to not leave the course, but to catch up on their own. And we started this lovely little community. And I think that was the birth of. Of the entire entrepreneurship is that I could create something on my own. That stuck. And that program, by the way, is still there today since 1997. It was that. That I didn't want to p. I enjoyed teaching so much that I didn't want to pursue this avenue of making jewelry and selling it and doing the craft show route. It just didn't seem. Seemed to me it wasn't a good fit for. For me, I really liked being around students. I really liked being around these communities. And I think the real key here is that it was a community. And that was where the passion was starting to. Starting to set was really these building blocks of that. And then what it really got going is that I went to a conference, a professional conference for goldsmiths called the Society of North American Goldsmiths. And it was in that conference that I had realized what I really need to do was to make some kind of a community studio where there was teaching in it and try to combine it somehow. And I had written it all out. I mean, literally quote the napkin sketch. Okay. And I, I sat there at these, all these academics and all these people and I went, yeah, I think I'm going to start a school. And so there was a person in my class over at Cambridge center who had just made tons of money in the dot com and she'd come to me and she said, you know, I've been with you and I've been seeing how you work and how you engage students and how you're Always forward thinking on everything you do and I understand. She said, what would you like to do? And I gave her my little napkin sketch and said, well there's. The teaching is over here and then the private students are over here and we have this community and da da da da da. And she said that sounds like a really great idea. Literally reached into her purse and wrote me a check for $10,000 and says here, follow your bliss.

Use that 10k to you know, buy rent, buy equipment and get started. Right?

Yeah, we got a bank account. I mean I knew from my time of teaching, the one thing that I always tell students when they're trying to break into ending kind of making jewelry, the first people that you make friends with is your vendors. Because those vendors are going to help you. They want to, they want to help you any way that they can in order for you to follow your dream. So I went to one of those conferences. I went, visited all the vendors in their vendor room and I shook their hands and I took their cards and I talked to them and every single one, it was just like met every single one. And then I still do this to this day. I have a stack of pre printed like thank you cards. Right. And every time I meet somebody and I get their, their card, I write a thank you note and I put my business card every time. Nothing, nothing is more powerful than the written word still.

Yeah, that's then gratefulness, you know, just to thank someone for them and for you. It's powerful tool. Another powerful thing you mentioned was community. I realized the importance of community lately by going on 10 day silent meditation retreat and you know, just being in the monastery, quote unquote and just you know, feeling the community here, you know, that volunteering for some stuff and doing good karma, helping out, you know, and just this little sense of community. And I was like, okay, this is what I need to build with my businesses was another powerful point that you mentioned. And I'm just curious that the woman that gave you 10k, like are you still getting in touch with her? Like you, do you still frequently talk to her or no?

Nope, nope. See the school in both of their iterations and then they just, they just said go for it. And they had sort of done their thing, you know, they certainly watched everything that we did, but they never, they never really came back and was a part of, part of what, what had gone on. It wasn't a mentorship, it was a just a pure out and out gift. And that helped me a lot in because she had no idea in crafting a school. But she knew that I probably had a good idea how to do it. And it was certainly very rough in the first couple of years. It was just like, how do you get people? And then we really had to think like, okay, we don't have a lot of money for brochures and, you know, sending it. So I think what it is, you just have the good entrepreneur. I always thought this, what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur first. I think they're. I think they're born. I don't think you can teach it. I think there has to be something innate in you that has a small thing.

Yeah, a small seed.

Yep. I mean, the teaching can certainly help, but unless you have that, that place in your, that passion and that place in your mind that that can turn those sort of ideas into reality, certainly taking the help along the way is great. But if you don't have that ability to say, I think this is a good idea, I'm going to risk it and I will jump off that cliff. Cliff. Because good entrepreneurs are cliff jumpers. They are not people who are just stand back. Okay. The second thing is, is that we're visionaries. So a good entrepreneur, or at least for me, I don't know if I'm good or not, but I would visual, I would visualize the thing happening. Okay. Henceforth, the whole thing of like, how I'm going to have the school, I saw it. I saw it in my mind. All the people are going to be sitting here and we have all this tools over here, waterings over here, and then the sell stuff over here, and then we have our private students over there. And that is exactly how it came. It came out. So now comes the second part. Now you have to run it as a business. Okay. So I tried to get a business loan from the bank and they all latter me, okay, Totally left at me. SBA came through. They helped. I got a little. I still have a $15,000 credit line. They just paid back whenever through, through SBA. And, and you know, it's, it's, it's been. I haven't used it in quite a while, so it's, you know, still there, but it's there whenever I need it, which is great. But I had to sit there and think, what's going to set us apart from every other school, every other part, but what, what will be different? And the thing was different that I noticed is that once teachers, usually they would go to some non profit organization because there really were very few private organizations, usually nonprofit, and they Would say, oh, yes, we would love to teach you. We're going to pay you $150 a day, and then you have to take care of all of your own, you know, expenses and everything else. And I said, that's ridiculous because we will never. Oh, and by the way, if you sell your jewelry, we want 30. I mean, you know that this is, this is, this is crazy, right? Like, well, great extortion, you know. So I wanted. So I put forth a model which I now still call the metalworks template. And the model is simple. You put the best teachers in and you pay them the best salary that you can absolutely afford. And if they need all their expenses, you pay it. If they need plane tickets, you pay it. If you need. If you need. If they need a tool, you make sure that specialty in there for their, for their class. Teachers have one job, and that's to teach my students. That's it. Okay? Students, yes. We created relationships with students. But honestly, you know, I don't want any student taking advantage of me saying they couldn't get the ferry off an island and therefore I should give them credit. No, I'm sorry, because like an airplane, you know, I'm not going to, you know, it's not really, you know, non refundable. Thank you. And then I charged three times as much as most places every other place did. Okay, but you're getting paid by the most coolest teacher on the planet. And when I made that move, my workshops, instead of taking weeks and weeks and weeks to fill, they were filled within 20 to 30 minutes at the newer price.

I like the simplicity of it. And I also like the model. I mean, could we compare it to like a Ferrari via Satoya maybe? But it's, it's, you know, it's the experience. Maybe not because, you know, it's still affordable at 150 bucks price point or something like that. 200. You know, I think people would pay, definitely be taught by the best, you know, and have an epic experience so that they come back so that they refer you via you. Hiring average people and you know, word of mouth not spreading. Do you realize mostly on word of mouth even nowadays. I saw that you have an Instagram and Facebook. You put up some ads in there or is it still mainly word of mouth?

It's just word of mouth. I just got a. I just got a commission today for someone who's moved to Seattle. They want their wedding rings done. I mean, you know, people know who I am, they know what I do. So I have more work than I absolutely know what I need to do with. Right, you know, right now. No, and the funny thing is that metalworks really, I mean, there's no ads at metalworks. There's no, they aren't anywhere. They just, it's total. Was word or, you know, word or mouth. But there was one more key component in the whole template were teachers. Because the hardest thing that I ever recognized that when I went to teach in a workshop is that, you know, you have no idea where anything is in that school. You know, I don't know what's in their drawers. I'd spending like a few minutes or at least a couple of hours. One of before, like early I would get there and I'd just be opening drawers and find out where, where, where everything is. So with metalworks, because we had the private community, all the private students that were all behind a door, you know, with a window, I turned to them and said, hey, how would you like to be a TA for this famous teacher? And they're like, yes, of course, of course, of course. And so now in a way, they became my scrub nurses for the surgery. Okay. For the or. And so the teacher would come in and they say, well, I'm looking for a particular file and they just run over, open the drawers, there it is. Okay. And then they could move. So the most important thing for me in business, a teaching experience, writing any of my art, is that if it does not serve a level of flow, then it's not going to work. It has to flow really seamlessly. Okay. And I will allude to your 10 day retreat because I'm wondering if. Was that Vipassana?

Yes, it was.

I'm also, I'm also Vipassana person. So that is a very. I'm three times now on 10 day retreats and I completely believe they change a way that I look at the world and how I operate. And so now it's sort of looking at this level of, you know, I like to be excited, but it's sort of tempered in this way of, of equanimity.

I got you. I just want to touch back on the genius of your strategy because you, you pick the best, you pay them the best and you give them assistance, you give them everything they want, you know, they're like kings and queens and you get out of their way, you know. And that strategy is, is very much smart, you know, and I'm about to test it in my business too, because on my side, you know, it's like with an agent, I've been testing a Bunch of talents at high price points, low price points. Now we've been implementing, you know, a bunch of things like, for example, daily meditations, daily yoga classes, paying your gym, paying your Airbnb. And yeah, I'm working on pampering my employees. Just that. Yet, like, I'm yet to go after the best talent because in my sphere, you know, best talent, they might charge, I don't know, best, like 100 bucks an hour. And that means like thousand bucks per day for me, you know, so I'm still in the midst of testing all that, but I like the smartness of it. I'm definitely taking notes here.

Yeah, it's a good way. I mean, and I'm. And I'm an outlier, okay? I didn't hire some bunch of managers and big media groups and everything else. I depended. I focused on a particular demographic. So my demographic is women who are usually about 50 to 55 and older. That's my demographic because these are women who have been taking care of their kids forever and their kids are all going much into college now. And now they're looking, now they're turning around saying, but what about me? Okay? And even with that, they come to the class, they might take an eight week beginning jewelry class. Okay? So now they. A lot of money for the eight week jewelry class. They've got me teaching it. Who's running the place? So now expectations are now running high from all of their friends saying, well, what are you making in this jewelry class? Okay? Jewelry, any kind of craft takes an incredible amount of time to understand the nuances and the construction and how things go. Okay? So I had to work out a system for my students to, to take care of that. That expectation of I need to make something and show it off to my.

The learning curve.

Yes. And so by week two, everybody had a simple band ring on, polished band ring that they've all made on their finger. And that's something they could go and. Because then they get to talk about it. Oh, my gosh. So I got to do this and I got to do this and I got to do this and tell me where the word of mouth comes. That little tiny thing becomes the perfect movement for a word of mouth. And then you.

Very smart, very smart. Because, for example, with my employees, right, like when I onboard them, the new ones, they need these little small victories so that they can get momentum. And if not, they just leave, you know, and they burn out. Same for my clients. I need to show them in the first month that I can generate them three Meetings at least and that they can close at least one, you know, have some kind of low hanging fruit so that they don't burn out. So again, this is genius.

I told you I had a curious.

Yeah, you have actually. Very entertaining. What's the difference between the meditative states you get in when you're crafting jewelry versus the meditative state that you experience in Vipassana?

I think they're both in flow, but it's something also I call the zone. Okay? The zone is. The zone is when you are no longer present. You are a vehicle for whatever is coming through. You're just the vehicle to take it in. Okay. And, and both times, the best work that I do in teaching and crafting, you know, I'm working on a big solo, the installation. The best advice I can give myself at that point is to align myself to what it is to be like in a meditative state and get out of my way. Okay. Because as soon as I start bringing my ego to it, I start bringing all the stuff to it. There's a lot of things that I can't control. I simply, my best move is to get out of my own way and let the process go through. I have failures or do I have falling? Yes, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. You can't move forward unless you fail a bit. Okay. I like to say Simon, I like his falling is a good, is a good one. Good guy, by the way. I like him a lot. I will go and with this total idea drawings, everything goes right and then all of a sudden something goes horribly, horribly, horribly wrong and I have a deadline. You know, like I was doing these man service awards. I literally have a deadline because somebody's going to go take it on a plane and fly it out to, you know, fly it out to Nevada in five days. And I'm just completely freaking out because this thing has to go on the plane. I'm just. First I call an expert and say, what the hell did I wrong? Try this, try this. Go back. All right, so go back. That seems to be working. Okay, I've got this thing, it seems to be working and then, you know, you just sort of muscle through it and muscle through it and muscle through it. But again, it's not to a lot of the accidents, but also there's happy accidents. Things that I absolutely didn't expect to happen. I was like, wow, where did that come from? Because it's coming from a place of me not trying to direct it, but a thing from something completely sideways that I didn't understand. But the Key of it is that you always have to have an open mind to do it.

Your mind sometimes leads us to very interesting paths. I would say sometimes errors are on purpose. A bunch of inventions, a bunch of game changing inventions in our modern era have been like the result of errors. I could think of, for example, lsd. LSD was discovered by accident and penicillin and you know, like the filtration process, you know, like pasteurizing stuff. Like all these amazing things have come error. And I mean, we have like a couple minutes left. Do you still have time for two more questions?

Yep, sure.

Okay. Burning Man. What can you tell us about Burning man community and how did it shape you?

I think the first thing, the day that I arrived, which was actually in my book, and I'm looking at this incredible community of all these little camps coming up around me and they're building and decorating and I'm just sort of like, what planet did I just land on? Because it was just this planet. I mean, there are tens of thousands of people. It's insane. You know, my first walk through was seeing a fish tank that was set up on the, on the roadway and two beanbags and. And these very confused fish that were lit up and you could sit at night and watch the fish go just like what? You know. The second one was a very pivotal sculpture that was in 2006, hope and fear. That was called Euchronia. It was sort of nicknamed the Waffle because the people were Belgian and the Belgian Waffle. But no, the name of it is Ukronia. And it was just this huge, huge, huge sculpture. They're just taking, I think not two by fours, but some other kind of wood and they're just sitting with nail guns and creating this just entire sculpture that you can walk through it and in it. And it sent to me right away, oh my God. Okay, you put. You would take the time to put that in a sculpture park, it would be two years. It's insurance. It's, you know, can we. Committees and everything else. No, there was just this spontaneous. Like we have this thing and we've approved to do it and we're going to go for it and we're going to make it. In the end, they burned it all up. And that was the other thing. It was like, oh my. So it was the temporal. It was sort of the wabi sabi of the impermanence that I absolutely loved on it that you could not. That this, that this circus just sort of like arrived and colors and car. Cars and people you would talk to and I got separated from my husband and it was late at night and I was just freaked out because I didn't know how to find my camp. And this lovely person said, oh, you're there. Okay, I will walk you back there. And took 45 minutes to walk back to my camp. We had this lovely conversation and then you just kind of like drifted away. And then that was that. And it was that point in service that has been the one takeaway that I have had for all of these years. It's the takeaway in my art. It's the takeaway in how I teach, how I write. There is a level of noble service for me that I want to honor my craft. I want to honor my students. I want to honor the. The potential subject that I am writing about. And, and I think Burning man gave me this one major takeaway. I have an entire community of people who are at my back. Two years of COVID whatever. We've been back and forth. This is how we've used Zoom and we've used. We have. We are each other's backs. And that just to me that I know I have one, my estate lawyer who is now my. She's on my full fourth referral to all Burners because she's a person who gets it. That's all I needed. And she just does everybody really, really, really well. And, and so, yeah, I mean I really want to set up the burner service directory because they're like vetted people who. I know that they get who we are.

Last question. Where do you want to take Metal Works?

Well, Metalworks is gone. I mean Metalworks is now under other ownership. Okay. They have now a non profit. There's another director. So it's, it's on the way of what it. Of what it's doing. So there's really nothing. I personally, you know, I, you know, it's a, it's a good question. It's sort of like, well, where do I want to take myself now? I want to keep writing books. And right now, if I have an ask, I need to have CBS run their blessing over my book. And this is going to be my biggest because not in writing it, but dealing with CBS who has to grant me the license in order to research all of the archives so I can get into the photographs and get. And take a look and see all the, all the jewelry that was there. So. Yeah.

Well, we wish you the best for that for your book scan. Thank you for, for taking a interview with me today. Was highly entertaining and I keep you posted as per when this is online. All right, great.

Thank you very, very much. I'm very, very appreciative of your kind outreach. Was lovely to meet you too.

Thank you, Karen. My pleasure. We'll stay connected.

All right, bye.