Abby Glassenberg and Kristin Link are the founders of Craft Industry Alliance, a membership trade industry organization dedicated to supporting professional crafters, makers, designers, retailers and much more in their business endeavors.
Craft Industry Alliance -- or CIA as it’s now refereed to --  is a membership platform that launched this fall. It offers forums, articles, webinars, and much more for their members. They also publish a bi-weekly journal with in-depth business and industry articles both for members and the greater public.
Abby and Kristin are both veteran bloggers within the craft industry. They’ve created incredible communities individually, contributed valuable content for years, and supported their communities extensively. Creating and building Craft Industry Alliance was the next logical step for them on their journey online, I was thrilled to hear why they started it, how it’s been, and more.
Topics we discuss today are how Abby and Kristin’s backgrounds as educators and bloggers have underlined the importance of sharing information to help other businesses grow and succeed, and how CIA now encompasses those beliefs. We also talk about actually building community, what the platform offers, why it was important to them to pay their contributors, their own tips for starting a business, and how success is an incredible motivator.