photo credit: Hula Sevent

Earlier this month Katie of The Wheatfield suggested a blog post for Poppytalk on being overwhelmed as an independent artist/entrepreneur.  As she mentioned, many are sure to be in this boat and she'd love to hear from others about dealing with the stresses of running a successful business.

I couldn't agree with her more.  And as I thought about this, I instantly thought of Rena Tom.  Rena recently started her newest business as a retail strategist for creative business owners, and having previously owned the successful boutique and art gallery, Rare Device with locations in New York and San Francisco along with being a new mom, I thought she might have some great advice with respect to this question. 

Please follow Rena here in a mini series as she starts a conversation starting today about balancing success.  She'll explain more in her post but I just wanted to say how excited I am to have her joining us and I definitely recommend visiting her new site where she covers so much more with respect to running a business both on and off line.  She has a lot of knowledge to share and executes explaining it so well as you'll see (if you haven't found her already).  So please join me in welcoming her, with her first post following shortly.


A little bit about Rena:

Rena Tom is a retail strategist for creative business owners. She previously owned Rare Device, a boutique and art gallery with locations in New York and San Francisco that was renowned for its carefully edited collection of design objects, books, housewares and accessories, and for supporting small, innovative designers and artists whose work was not easily found in stores. For this work, she has been featured in publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Lucky, Real Simple, Food and Wine and Martha Stewart Weddings as well as on many design blogs and newsletters. She has contributed an interview to Craft Inc.: Turn Your Creative Hobby Into a Business, and has been a juror for the AltCraft section of the American Craft Council Show.

Previously Rena operated a successful jewelry design and wedding invitation design business and was a web content management consultant. She remains an avid crafter, and blogs about personal projects as well as retail trends and small business tips at renatom.net.. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and baby boy in an apartment filled with too many laptops, Sprecher root beer, half-finished craft projects and overdue library books.