Building Tesoro: What Owning a Product Business Taught Me About Design

I started a business at 24. I didn't know yet how much it would teach me.

At 24 years old, I started Tesoro Design in West Chester, Pennsylvania, alongside a business partner and an angel investor.

I was a designer and leatherworker, but becoming a business owner meant learning everything surrounding the product, too: sourcing materials, pricing, merchandising, photography, marketing, retail, wholesale, customer service, production—and figuring out what people were actually willing to buy.

Tesoro became my education in what happens after you design something beautiful.

Learning to build—and rebuild

Three years in, the business changed dramatically. My business partner left to pursue a career in public service, and our angel investor relocated his business.

I had a decision to make.

I chose to keep going.

I moved Tesoro to Philadelphia and opened a retail store on South Street in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood. I started teaching workshops after hours and was soon covering my monthly rent with the workshops alone. The business continued to grow, and eventually I took another leap: opening a dedicated studio space in a building filled with other artists.

One month later, COVID hit.

Almost overnight, the business I had spent years building around physical retail, making and community had to operate in a world where people weren't walking into stores.

So I started experimenting.

When the market changed, I changed with it.

I moved the business online and began looking for products that made sense for what customers were experiencing at that exact moment.

I sourced vintage leather goods, restored them and sold them online. I created at-home leatherworking kits and filmed instructional videos so customers could learn to make something themselves while they were stuck at home.

But I was also watching my creative community struggle with the same uncertainty.

I started an Instagram artist series where I interviewed other artists about their work and how they were adapting to the enormous changes happening around them.

It wasn't the business plan I had written.

It was the business the moment required.

From surviving to growing again

After COVID, my focus shifted again.

I began expanding Tesoro's wholesale collection and thinking more seriously about how products could be designed for production beyond what I could personally make with my own two hands.

I hired a full-time maker and taught them leatherworking, allowing me to increase production while maintaining the construction and quality standards I had developed.

That transition taught me something incredibly important about product design:

A product isn't truly scalable if the designer is the only person who knows how to make it.

Designing became as much about communication, specifications, repeatability and teaching as it was about creativity.

Knowing when to close something you've built

Eventually, I made the difficult decision to close Tesoro.

When I announced the closure, customers showed me just how meaningful the brand had become to them. In the final two months, Tesoro generated $40,000 in sales.

I'm proud of that number, but what stays with me more is what it represented.

I had built products people wanted to own—and a brand people cared enough about that, when they learned it was disappearing, they showed up.

Tesoro never really left my work.

Closing the company didn't end my relationship with product design.

If anything, Tesoro shaped the way I approach it today.

It taught me that a beautiful product isn't enough. It has to have a reason to exist. It has to work for the customer, be possible to produce, make sense at its price point, and respond to the way people actually live.

Leatherworking and making things with my hands are still passions of mine. But the part I've carried forward most is the problem-solving.

Today, whether I'm designing something myself, developing a product alongside a maker, building a collection or deciding which product deserves a place in an assortment, I'm still asking the same question I learned to ask at Tesoro:

How can I make something that someone will genuinely want to live with—and that makes their life a little better?

The Products I Bet On: The Seba Scalloped Collection

And then sold out…

Seeing where the market was going—and designing for it.

Some of my favorite product ideas start by connecting two things: what I'm seeing in the market and what our artisan partners already do exceptionally well.

While researching home décor trends, I began noticing a shift away from rigid, minimal silhouettes toward softer shapes, curves and playful edges. Scalloped details were beginning to appear across interiors, and I believed this softer design language had staying power.

Rather than simply sourcing an existing scalloped product, I saw an opportunity to translate the trend through one of our existing artisan techniques.

From trend research to original design

Our artisan partners in Bangladesh were already highly skilled in handweaving natural date palm leaf. I loved the warmth and texture of the material, but I wanted to rethink the silhouette.

I developed the scalloped edge as the defining feature of the collection, transforming a traditional woven basket and tray into something softer, more decorative and more aligned with where I saw the home market moving.

The challenge was to make the scallop feel intentional without losing the organic quality that makes a handmade product special.

Designing for our customer—not just the trend

Trend research is useful, but I don't believe in developing something simply because it's trending.

For me, the more important question is:

Does this trend make sense for the brand, the customer and the maker?

Here, it did.

The scalloped silhouette brought a contemporary point of view to a natural material, while the neutral palm leaf kept the collection versatile and approachable. The pieces could live comfortably in a modern home without losing the handwoven character at the center of the product.

I also designed the concept across multiple forms, allowing the scalloped edge to become a recognizable collection language rather than a one-off detail.

Designing with the maker in mind

The collection was handcrafted by a partner in Bangladesh, a Ten Thousand Villages artisan partner since 1983.

One of the most important parts of my design process is understanding what a maker already does well and finding opportunities to evolve that craft for today's market.

Instead of asking an artisan partner to adopt an entirely unfamiliar process, I was able to take an existing material and weaving expertise and introduce a new silhouette around it.

Their craft became the foundation. My role was identifying where we could take it next.

And then it sold out.

The collection ultimately sold through.

For me, that's what made this project especially meaningful. The scalloped edge started as an observation during trend research, became a design idea, was translated through an existing artisan technique, and ultimately became a product customers responded to.

It's also a good example of how I approach product development:

See the opportunity. Understand the maker. Design for the customer. Then connect the three.

01 — TREND RESEARCH

02 — THE OPPORTUNITY
These existing products are longtime sellers at Villages, and they were my inspiration for these new products..

03 — MY DESIGN

04 — THE COLLECTION

05 — IN THE HOME
Your lifestyle photographs.

06 — THE RESULT
SOLD OUT

How I Know When a Product Is Worth Developing

Finding the opportunity between décor and consumables

Good product development starts before the sketch. I first ask: Why should this product exist for this brand, for this customer, right now?

When developing our first candle collection, I was thinking about a larger challenge facing the fair trade industry. Customers have more choices than ever, including an enormous number of lower-priced products and brands. At the same time, consumable categories like coffee and chocolate offer something traditional home décor doesn't: a reason for customers to come back and purchase again.

I saw candles as an opportunity to sit between those two worlds.

They could still be beautiful, artisan-made objects that belonged within our home assortment—but because they are used up, they also created the potential for repeat purchase.

Designing for the market, not just the moment

Once I identified the category opportunity, I looked at what was happening in the broader home market.

Rather than introducing a traditional candle assortment, I focused on sculptural silhouettes, striped pillars, unexpected proportions, and bold color combinations. The goal was to create candles that functioned as décor before they were ever lit.

That gave the collection another advantage: customers weren't simply choosing a scent or a candle. They were choosing an object for their home.

Turning art into a color strategy

I didn't want the palette to come from a standard trend report alone. I began looking at paintings and pulling apart the relationships between colors that made them compelling. Picasso is a master of color theory, so I thought I would let him do a little of the work for me!

Soft blues and creams were interrupted by chocolate brown and acidic yellow. Pink, cobalt, mint, plum, and green created combinations that felt unexpected but still balanced.

Those paintings became a starting point rather than something to reproduce literally. I translated their palettes into stripes, color blocks, and sculptural forms that could work together as a cohesive collection.

Building a collection instead of a product

The final assortment intentionally included different heights, shapes, patterns, and color stories.

Some pieces were graphic. Others were sculptural. Some could stand alone, while others became more interesting when grouped together.

That variety was deliberate. I wasn't designing one candle—I was designing a collection that could be merchandised.

And that's one of the biggest things I consider when deciding whether an idea is worth developing: Does this product solve an assortment need? Can it create a larger story? Does it give the customer a reason to notice—and eventually come back?

For this collection, the answer was yes.