Founder Spotlight: Kelly Harris Smith
Kelly Harris Smith x Canvas Rebel Interview
Recently Kelly caught up with Canvas Rebel for a chat on all things Minni. From initial ideas to challenges along the way, and growing a business during Covid, Kelly shared all her insights and tips.
We include a couple interview highlights below, but click through to check out the full article!
We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
As a kid, I had creative tendencies, but most of my extra time was focused on sports. I went to college as “undecided,” played on the Division 1 soccer team, but was always attracted to arts and design. This interest led me to explore my options and I majored and graduated in architecture. I worked as a designer in an architecture office for a few years before starting a small textile and accessory business. This led me to co-found a sustainable textile company, and then to furniture design and the world of interior design. This circuitous route gave me an informal education, and I can honestly say I didn’t hear the term “industrial design” until I was several years out of school. If I had known about the many different possibilities in the design world in my youth, I may have chosen a different school or taken another path. But then I wouldn’t be here!
From the beginning, my vision for Minni has been to make arts education accessible to my former self and others who may have lesser access to art and design education. Part of this vision was to open multiple locations around Boston and ultimately expand into other communities, offering art and design programming to young children.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
In the fall of 2019, I was meeting with developers and looking at spaces for our second location. At the time, nothing felt like the right fit, which was timely, as a few months later the onset of Covid-19 abruptly halted our operations. We closed our physical studio twice for a total of 8 months and pivoted to online classes and developed a creative curriculum-in-a-box that we delivered by mail (and by hand on occasion). I did what I could to stay positive and afloat during that time of widespread uncertainty. Through the support of our amazing community, and the resilience of our team, Minni survived, and even with the uncertainty of an ongoing pandemic, we’ve begun to thrive again! In summer 2022, we opened our second location in Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston.
