While She Naps With Abby Glassenberg

On today's episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast, we’re talking about building a craft tool company with my guest Kelly Brooks.   Kelly and her husband, Scott Gardiner, are the team behind knitbrooks, where they create unique wooden crochet hooks. Kelly started knitbrooks in 2013 while she was working as a reporter/photographer at a small community newspaper in Alberta, Canada. She opened an Etsy shop to sell online, and participated in local handmade markets over the next few years. In 2017 she tried carving her very first crochet hook out of a branch she found in the forest, which was the beginning of something special. Kelly and Scott moved to Nova Scotia in 2019 and, despite graduating from an Ocean Fisheries and Aquaculture program, Scott joined the knitbrooks venture - they both decided to pursue crochet-hook-making full-time by the end of 2020. They now live on a small homestead (which includes a small flock of fiber sheep) in rural Nova Scotia with their one-year-old son, where they continue