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Emily studied communications and creative
writing for two and a half years at the University
of Nebraska, and reports, “One day I turned to my
roommate, Sara, told her I couldn’t stay in Lincoln
any longer and I needed to move to Santa Barbara.
I had never been here; I just knew I needed to be
here. I arrived December 28th, 1999. Sara got
here a few days later with a U-Haul and the rest is
history.” Emily completed her degree at Antioch in
Santa Barbara.
During the summer of 2007, Emily was
in Jackson Hole visiting her family. Her sister,
Hillary, who had a little store at the time called
Calamity Jane Cowgirls, was making coasters out
of horseshoes and needed to find leather backing.
“We’ve always been crafty, kitchy girls, so we
decided to just fuss around with leather scraps,”
recalls Emily, adding that they went into the
saddle shop to pick up the scraps. “I was like, ‘I
need to make a little clutch, let me see if I can
do this,’ so I got some lacing and a hole punch
from the garage and we took a six pack of beer to
our friend’s house across the street, sat on his dock
by his pond and whipped up some clutches. That’s
how it all started,” says Emily. Her hobby turned
into a craft – that craft into a budding business,
and, “the business turned into bags.”
Emily comes from a family of entrepreneurial
women. “My mom has been a business owner, my
sister is a business owner, and my grandmother,
Jackie, was very crafty. She was the ‘craft fair
queen,’ was an incredible tole painter, seamstress,
and she even sewed my mom’s wedding dress,”
says Emily. As a child, her mother taught sewing
lessons to all the little girls in her neighborhood.
“We had probably four or five sewing machines in
the basement of my house and just walls of fabric,
so I learned to sew at a very early age. I’m not really
good at instructions or following patterns… it’s
more like, I see it, I want to do it, I’m going to
figure out my own way to do it. That is what I did
all through high school.” Emily reports she didn’t
want to look like anyone else, so she sewed her own
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