Clark's Fabrication: Grant Pitch 2019

Clark’s Fabrication started out of necessity. After my sudden lay-off I picked up furniture restoration as a way to make an additional income. I began pulling furniture from the trash and restoring it to sell on Facebook Marketplace for a profit. Using my 12 years of Graphic Design and Marketing knowledge, I was able to target my demographic to market and sell my pieces successfully, create a brand behind our name, as well as build a fan base for my creations.
My husband Crosby began putting in the extra time after his 12 hour work days to make my daily production more efficient. It wasn’t long before he wondered if he could possibly move his Metal Fabricating experience into the garage as well. We decided it would be worth the risk to give it a try, so, he quit his job as a Shop Foreman to work from home exclusively. It only took 5 months for us to grow out of our home based space.
We have been in our space for just about a year and a half. We use our time in between a heavy production schedule to give back to our community. In addition to donating custom fabrications to local charities to raise money at auction, we created the group The Madison Heights Beautification Project on Facebook to inspire small scale local cleanups as part of a broader effort in our city. I was awarded a “Member at Large” seat on the Madison Heights Arts and Culture Advisory Board in September of 2017, and recently was unanimously voted in as the boards chair.
In August 2018 we began teaching workshops. We started with our professional skills, upholstery and welding, and transitioned into offering creative workshops of all sorts, including Pinterest Parties, and Flipping and Selling Furniture for Social Media. We are hoping, once we move into a bigger space to provide more creative resources to our community, as well as host events that help other small businesses in our community transition into a brick and mortar.
On March 1, 2018 the Mayor of our city of Madison Heights awarded me the first ever Mayors Ingenuity Award immediately following our first ever Pop-Up Makers Exhibition that drew in a crowd of more than 250 people and raised more that $1,200 for our Cities Arts Board to fund murals throughout our city. The event featured 15 local makers and sellers, in an exhibition style format, and provided a FREE, accessible creative event for our local residents. We focused our marketing on highlighting the artists involved, who all saw an uptick in their followings while preparing for, and just after the event.
Crosby and I would love to continue to do what we love, while using our available resources to help our community, and we could do so much more with just a few more feet of runway. We are looking to expand into a vacant building in what is being outlined as our city's downtown district. The downtown district is into year 2 of it’s 20 year plan. We want to see that timeline expedited substantially, and for the potential entrepreneurs in our city to benefit from it by creating a market that caters to them, and to the residents of our city. If we won this grant, it would move us closer to our goals of expansion, which would allow us to open our doors or resources to other artists and businesses wanting to grow, but just can’t justify the risk. Bare minimum, we want to be able to show it is possible. Like many other successful entrepreneurs before us, we started in our garage, we are living proof that with a little hard work, anything is possible.