International Women’s Week ft. Taylor Fox
Taylor Fox has committed her work to reflect the path of reconciliation. Using her beadwork and accompanying storytelling, Taylor is on a journey of reconnection and Indigenous economic revitalization. After graduating from the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, she backpacked across 18 countries over 8 months before settling into a marketing career in Toronto. Since then, she has made her way back to her hometown where she and her sister create their beadwork as a heart-led side hustle.
In the face of the pandemic, new challenges have arisen, and resilience has been essential for the success of many companies. How did you embrace resiliency, in order to survive and thrive amidst the pandemic?
The pandemic was actually the reason I started a business! In March 2020, I lost my job and used my newly found free time to teach myself how to create Indigenous beaded earrings. I then taught my sister and together we formed Commanda Collective.
Starting a business in a pandemic has been challenging, and despite craving face to face interaction with our customers, we chose the e-commerce model to ensure our audience could always access us!
Being an Objiwe woman, the word resilience is multi-faceted in meaning and sadly denotes the survival of intergenerational trauma from residential schools.
Being an entrepreneur is a challenge and being a woman-identifying entrepreneur is another challenge in itself. Has there been a time when being a woman pursuing entrepreneurship created additional obstacles? If so, how did you overcome these challenges?
I think the biggest obstacles have been the unwritten, unsaid messages and programmings we get as women that we are less worthy of wealth, less worthy to charge fairly, and overall less worthy of success. This is a theme my sister and I have unpacked together while choosing prices for our work. It is something that is even more compounded when we look at the history of handmade goods by indigenous women. This relationship with money, wealth, and success is something that many women still shy away from — but we are trying to look at it head on from a trauma-informed place to recognize the deeply embedded history of inequity that still echoes in our current social framework. It’s a journey, but it’s not something that can be easily ignored on an entrepreneurial path.
Did anyone that inspire you in or during your pursuit of entrepreneurship? Subsequently, what inspired the idea for your business/organization?
Our business is named after and created in honour of our great grandmother, Susan. She has always been an inspiration to us and her spirit has guided us since we were young. Despite probably never using the word entrepreneur, she, like many other Indigenous women across turtle island, was an entrepreneur for most of her life. She designed, created, and handmade thousands of pieces of beaded leather goods and jewelry. She would sell them in local shops, but mostly relied on word of mouth spreading about her mesmerizing beaded designs.
We love having strong representation of women identifying leaders in the entrepreneurial community, is there anything you wish to tell the next generation of aspiring women entrepreneurs?
Your intuition can become one of your strongest business skills. Listen to it and you will allow it to grow stronger.
*This feature was published in honour of the International Women’s Week, 2022.
