Make a Difference: Shop from Small Business

What Your Support Means to Me as a Small Business Owner

I’ve been working for more than 25 years but had never worked for myself before we moved to Prince Edward Island and purchased Island Stoneware in 2017. Growing up in Alberta, my parents owned their own business, as did most of our family and friends. I saw up close the joy and the stress of being a small business owner, but I didn’t fully understand the experience until I became a business owner. The rush you get when you can surprise or delight a customer. Then, the immediate worry that there might not be another customer. The idea that you can set your own hours and then realizing that means you can choose which six of the seven days in a week to work! Here are a few things I want to share about what it means to me when people choose to support small businesses.

The Ripple Effect

When you shop at a small business that sources its products from another small business you’re creating a ripple that supports multiple small businesses. Here at Island Stoneware, every single one of our wholesale customers is an independent small business.

When you buy our pottery at Mirabella in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, or at Celtic Creations in North Vancouver, British Columbia, or at the many places in between, your purchase directly supports the staff and owners of those shops and their small business suppliers, like us.

It doesn’t end there, we buy a custom clay from another small business, Tucker’s Pottery Supplies in Richmond Hill, Ontario.

Like waves in a pond, your support of small business keeps rippling out. 

You can support local - everywhere

There are great shops like Heartstrings in Smithers, BC or Made in the Maritimes in Halifax, Nova Scotia that carry Island Stoneware and offer an incredible range of products to their customers, local and online. They offer local character and the opportunity for prosperity. Your purchases in Smithers and Halifax helps keep dollars in their local economies AND it also means you’re giving an artisan in Summerside, Prince Edward Island a job she loves that otherwise might not exist. 

This is the power of your dollars spent with small businesses.

You support innovation & creativity

Small business owners work incredibly hard to create viable businesses. Through the toil and sweat we work to make or find products that fill a need or a void. When you buy from a small business you’re supporting all that innovation and creativity, and you’re investing in more of it. Every time you buy something from Island Stoneware, you invest in our future and the future of small businesses across Canada… the ripple effect!

Thank you very much for supporting us and small businesses wherever you are! We can’t do it without you.