A success story from Native Makers

Rosie Drake-Amery is a long-term friend of Real Ideas, as a member we’ve decided to share her recent success story and links to upcoming projects.

Native Makers is part of the Crowdfunder Pay It Forward campaign, launched during the early stages of lockdown. Through this, Rosie was able to raise enough support to continue to build the Native Makers community and develop a recovery strategy, for the future of her great markets and events.

This hasn’t come easy; Rosie’s hard work and determination has paid off. Rosie will join Real Ideas Organisation as part of the webinar ‘Managing finance when the world has turned upside down’ on Thursday 7^th May at 1pm -2pm to discuss her challenges and experiences with funding at this difficult time for the creative events industry.

Managing finance when the world has turned upside down

Watch the webinar

Lets hear from Rosie about Crowdfunder and Native Makers…

“Hi! I’m Rosie, I’m the founder at Native Makers. NM is a platform for creative people. We provide support for creative entrepreneurs through makers markets, workshops and coaching. I started NM when I recognised a space for curated markets in the South West of England. Since then, Native Makers has grown to become a platform to promote and support emerging creatives in Devon, Cornwall and beyond. I’m a young business woman, running my own fashion brand alongside NM. I’m here to build confidence in creatives, to nurture their personal goals and help them to create stronger businesses.

COVID-19 restrictions meant multiple event cancellations for me – This has hit our makers hard. Many of them rely on our events to pay their bills. I need your help to ensure that we can continue to provide support for our cohort throughout their time in isolation, and come back with a bang at the end of it – our makers will need NM more than ever.

We’re based in the South West of England, an area with around 25% of the population self employed. We’ve grown our cohort from 15 to 150 in 5 years and we don’t intend to stop there.

Of our current cohort, the majority are female and under 30. Without NM, these individuals would be forced to move away from this region to gain the same support that NM provides. By retaining these creatives and helping them to build their businesses, we are directly nourishing our creative community. We’ve produced this campaign with Crowdfunder to keep our makers in their jobs and maintain the focus on the creative economy.”

“Native makers is the most welcoming and friendly fair I’ve ever been a part of. As a freshly graduated illustration student, it gave me a much needed boost to getting my brand ‘out there’ in the public eye – I can’t wait to apply for the next one!”

More information on Rosie’s Crowdfunder can be found here.

This video looks at Native Makers and Rosie’s other business Roake Studio.

A message from Rosie:

Thanks to our @crowdfunderuk we’ll be back whenever it’s safe to do so. If you need some encouragement to apply for our events, look no further than this bunch of friendly fresh faces from our winter market. Each year we welcome a whole new wave of makers to our community. You don’t need a fancy website to apply, just wiz us a link to your social media account and share what you love doing most. We love to welcome applications from newbies and with our affordable pitch fees and carefully curated makers, you’re looking in the right place! You’re inspiring and exciting at every stage – You got this! Got questions about applying? Drop them in the comments, send us a DM or email nativemakersdevon@gmail.com.