Ever since Carly Perry was a little kid, growing up in a Jewish family in Tennessee, she wanted to open her own art and design business.
“I’ve always been interested in making stuff with my hands, so my brand and my art is sort of an extension of me,” she said.
But it wasn’t until the middle of 2021, now living in Cincinnati and soon to start a masters program in the business of art and design, that Perry took the leap of faith and opened her own store.
Now she designs, makes, and sells her own products under the banner of CarlyMakesIt on Etsy and Instagram. Perry offers an assortment of items, from mini jars with tops that look like berry pies, to Halloween coffin earrings made of “polymer clay, glitter, love, good vibes.”
She also sells Judaica, like pomegranate earrings with gold leaf and a star of david necklace.
“I always knew that I wanted to debut Judaica in my shop, but admittedly, I was a little bit hesitant or afraid in some ways,” Perry said.
“But since it’s not something that we should be ashamed of,” she decided to go for it. “And really, on the internet, people are going to figure [out she’s Jewish] anyway…it’s no secret to anybody in my personal life that I’m who I am.”
Perry’s journey to working in art and design started with an innate love – “ever since I was a little kid, I’d been drawing on pretty much any surface possible,” she said – but Perry really credits high school and college classes with opening the art world to her.
“Education definitely shaped me, especially into a designer,” Perry said. “Designing is problem solving…and because I had people around me who encouraged that and also had artistic endeavors, I then took a bunch of classes in school that guided those skills.”
Taking those classes also introduced her to a core tension in art and design: Should artists make fine art geared toward galleries and museums? Or is it better to focus on affordable and functional art?
Those questions also shape Perry’s business, which purposefully leans into making affordable art that can be a feature of anyone’s day. That’s both a business and aesthetic decision.
“I really like to have cute everyday things, and it seems like other people like it, too,” Perry said. “Fine art has this kind of, I don’t want to say accessibility threshold – but it seems like, if you have a piece of fine art in your home, and it’s thousands of dollars, that’s not attainable for everyone all the time. So I guess I just wanted everyone to have a little piece of something I made.”
Running her own business has come with its ups and downs. Designing and making the art is Perry’s real love, but now she also has to keep track of costs, do customer support, and maybe hardest of all, market herself online with different posts and videos.
“It’s harder than I thought it would be,” Perry said. “I think a lot of people have the idea that it’s going to be easy because you’re doing what you want to do all day, but it is a job.”
But operating CarlyMakesIt is also a unique learning experience. While she completed her masters in the business of art and design, nothing quite compares with hands-on experience.
Her most important lesson is to still take things slow and make every product a quality effort, even when she might want to rush through for more products and more orders.
“Every single thing that I make, I want to be really proud of, and I don’t want to have any doubts about it…that’s kind of hard, but it’s rewarding,” Perry said.
“Maybe I should have done it the other way around, you know, gotten [the] business degree prior to starting the business,” she said. “I kept feeling that pull to create, and it’s something that I do every day, kind of just to stay sane, really.”
Making Judaica also helps Perry connect to her Jewish identity, though it doesn’t always feel easy to do so in a world that is rife with antisemitism.
Judaism is “a pillar of my existence, and I feel like I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t express that part of me,” she said. “It’s one of a few themes that I incorporate into my work, and I feel like it’s more important now than ever” to express that.
While designing and planning for Judaica, Perry also researches classic Judaica and Jewish symbols to better understand why and how to incorporate them into her work. That research is a kind of callback to Sunday school.
“Doing that investigation, and brushing up on things that I maybe knew what it meant from Sunday school, back in the day,” is a way to reconnect with and understand Judaism, she said. “It’s definitely, if not brought me closer, then made me feel more at peace with everything.”
Of course, Perry also had great things to say about the Cincinnati Jewish community.
“The Jewish community has been one of the most supportive of my business,” she said. “I always look forward to working within the community, and doing anything that I can, to raise each other up.”
As her business evolves, Perry has many ideas for new products to create, like Jewish homewares and wall panels, all while continuing to build an audience at local markets. She also hopes to experiment with more materials.
“I am interested in things like metal smithing and things like blowing glass, and maybe, hopefully, one day incorporating a laser cutter into the things that I make – and maybe some sort of recycled material,” she said. “So I have all sorts of grand ideas.”
