These Hands is a storytelling project to share Northern Virginian’s stories through a focus on how they used their hands in memorable moments of life.
In 1978, Jennifer Crawford was an 8-year-old Army brat on Quantico Marine Corps Base, living in a barrack-turned-apartment with her sister, mom and dad. Not long before her mom moved off the base, taking Crawford and her sister but leaving her dad, Crawford befriended a local dog. The giant German shepherd lived chained to the garage behind one of the barracks. “All the kids were scared of the dog because he would lunge and growl and bare his teeth. But for whatever reason, he’d let me pet him. I loved him, and he loved me.” Crawford spent hours with the chained-up creature with passersby doing a double take at their friendship.
Thirty-something years later, the same faith and sincerity of heart has spiraled Crawford’s life into a series of success and challenges as a Northern Virginian entrepreneur. “The best things in your life come with pain,” she says. “The really good stuff in your life is never easy to come by, so it’s good our biochemical makeup remembers the good part rather than focus on the bad or else we’d have a lot less good things in our life.”
These hands:
1. Melted chocolate to pay rent in high-school. After her parents divorced, Crawford, her sister and her mother bounced around Northern Virginia. She was a junior in high school when her mother went through another divorce, this one much messier, and Crawford’s mom left for upstate New York. Crawford balked at leaving her friends, her boyfriend and her life in Virginia, so she rented a basement after her mom left the state. Now wholly independent, she needed to pay rent and living expenses. “I worked at Mr. Charlie’s Chocolate Factory in the mall. We melted down chocolate, tempered it and covered things with [it] like nut clusters, marshmallows, candy, turtles. If you worked there and you were a girl, you wore a white bonnet, and we worked in a glassed-in room through which people in the mall stared at us. We had a conveyer belt just like in ‘I Love Lucy’ where they lose control of the candy.”
2. Learned self-defense for job training at a center for the mentally disabled. “I went to George Mason after high school. I liked the idea of working with animals, but I couldn’t decide what to do, so I double majored in English and biology. Very quickly after joining college, I realized I didn’t know what I was doing there and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into something. And I thought, ‘All this money, all this money for this.’” Crawford tutored an 8-year-old, entered data for a telemarketing company and worked at the center for mentally disabled adults. “I was paying my way through school, plus I had some grants, a little student loan and some financial aid. But it was a pain. If the grants didn’t come in time, then my classes would get dropped and I wouldn’t know when the money was coming in, and when the money came in, the classes would be full and it was just really stressful. I was breaking out in hives from stress, and I was sick of being stressed financially.
“The positive thing was I started working at a veterinarian, and they started referring their clients to me. The clients needed someone to take care of their pets when they traveled. Because the animals were compromised health-wise, they would do much better in their home environment. So although it was job number four, I thought, ‘Sign me up.’ It gave me an excuse to leave my house and roommates and have a quiet place to study. And before I knew it, the vets were referring client after client to me. Pretty soon it occurred to me I could work with animals and not go to vet school, which I had no idea how I was going to pay for. I was making decent money, so it became two businesses called The Kept Pet and The Doggy Walkers. I had about 50 employees in the field before I sold it 11 years later.”
3. Painted an old Vienna auto body shop to open the Soundry. By the time Crawford was in her 30s, she accepted she’d always be an entrepreneur. She and her husband, Thor, would take long walks talking through business ideas. “One idea that kept coming up was creating a space where creative types like artists and musicians could come together not only to collaborate, but also where they would have a public space where people could discover them. We knew artists creating very cool things, but they didn’t have the resources to promote themselves, and some of them were very insulated creating in their own homes. We modeled it after a gym—like a membership model.”
Despite the 2008 recession and lack of bank loans for renovations, Crawford and her husband decided to move forward with their savings. “It was the most beautiful experiment but the most stressful thing I’ve ever done, and we lost a ton of money and we had to close after four years. It was hard to lose a place where you had that much creative freedom, but mainly it was a community that was the most satisfying thing—to see artists and musicians all come together. And it was very important they were really respected in that space. They were like rock stars when they walked in the door. These disenfranchised artists who hadn’t really been respected or revered for what they’d done now had a place to put their work on the walls and sell their work and have people coming to see their work. It was very empowering. When it closed it was devastating for a lot of people, including me. But I was so financially stressed, it also was a huge relief for me.”
4. Opened her studio door over 200 times to welcome in Jellyvision Podcast guests. Jellyvision is a “funny podcast about odd business” hosted by Crawford and Tim Trueheart. The duo interviews remarkable local artists and entrepreneurs and focuses on themes from letting your inner freak flag fly to debt reduction. “I started the podcast as a way to give indie creators more exposure, and that remains part of our mission, but it has evolved more into a podcast about adopting a business mindset as a creative and being successful with your art or passion. We are on our 205th episode. I have gotten a lot out of it, including an amazing network of creatives [and] a passion for the platform, and it inspired me to create my first conference, the DC PodFest.”
5. Hangs paintings and writes sketches. Crawford curated “Baby Canvas V”, an art show of miniature paintings, at Olly Olly over last Thanksgiving weekend. The “Baby Canvases” show is a great way to buy art from great artists even if you can’t afford a large 3×4-foot piece. With these tiny pieces, you can snap one up and not have a huge space commitment at home, which can be an issue that costs artists sales.” She also writes sketches and performs with the Improv Imps two to four times a month. “It’s a creative outlet better than any therapy. Your main job [when you perform] is to make other people look like good, and their job is to make you look good. So you can say whatever it is, but it has to be supported by your fellow players, and that’s really a great lesson to bring into all parts of your life. Start with and build on yes rather than no.”
Crawford is now the creator and owner of Social Media Rescue, which provides “innovative social media strategy and new media services for creative entrepreneurs, small business and podcasters.”
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