Meet Personnia Rawls and Kyla Hunter | Crafters & Entrepreneurs

We had the good fortune of connecting with Personnia Rawls and Kyla Hunter and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Personnia Rawls and, let’s start by talking about what inspires you?
As a small business built, curated, and run entirely by a mother and daughter, a lot of the inspiration that fuels our creative process comes from each other. We are constantly bouncing ideas off of each other, finding commonality in our passions. Both of us tend to find beauty in the world around us, choosing to make pieces inspired by the ones we love and our own personal interests. Often time, that means creating a piece for a loved one to signify an important milestone in their life, or creating the perfect piece for a customer, tailored to their own personal taste. At the end of the day, giving someone a reason to smile is the biggest inspiration either of us can hope for. By expressing our own creativity through our art, we’ve found that it can lead to an even deeper shared love between us, the customer, and the world itself.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
3T Factory is a small business run by a mother (Personnia) and daughter (Kyla) that specializes in jewelry, accessories, and more. Our name, 3T Factory, stands for Treasures, Trinkets, and Thingamabobs. It represents our desire to create a variety of things based on our own diverse interests. Ranging from the beautiful nuances of nature, our favorite pop culture references, music, and more, we created a business that showcases our love for it all. Why master one very niche art form when you can excel in a beautiful array of them. Some recommend limiting your shop to a specific market or theme, though we feel it’s a disservice to our creativity if we limit ourselves to any one medium. The magic of our shop is that anybody can find a special treasure, trinket, or thingamabob to call their own. Starting our small business was a challenging journey, but built upon the love of family and a desire to create, this shop has grown and flourished into something neither of us could have ever expected. The mother to our mother daughter duo, Personnia, began by making invitations to events, t-shirts, and doing photography locally in the early 2000’s. Once pregnant with her third child she’d found a love for beaded jewelry. Due to severe arthritis and the need to be home with her new son, she could no longer work a traditional job. With her second child, and little helper, Kyla, she began making jewelry to sell to friends and family. Their shared love for crafts continued to grow. By 2009 we began an Etsy shop to try and reach more people. Averaging about a sale a year, we were discouraged by the lack of exposure we’d gotten. So often, we see articles of businesses that began to boom overnight and social media posts where artists sell out on their first day of opening shop. We didn’t know what we were doing wrong, but knew we had to make some important changes. In 2019, we tripled our efforts by working on our branding, specializing our packaging, building up our social media presence, fine tuning our specialties, and getting to know our community. There were several times that we’d have to seriously consider the pros and cons. With the crafting market becoming increasingly more saturated and our workload between school and familial obligations driving a wedge between us and our craft, it became difficult to find our purpose in continuing. But, working in a business with your mom or your kid, laughing over spilled glitter, crying over resin mistakes, it really brings you closer. We find encouragement in each other. Our bond has grown stronger because of our craft and we pour that love and excitement into every single piece we make. Perseverance gets us through it all. Even on days where it feels like there is no point, we remind ourselves that financial gain is not our only goal. Sharing our love for the craft with others and making those connections with each customer is the most rewarding thing we could ask for. We strive for high quality, bettering ourselves and our skills. We self-market like crazy. We tailor our branding to fit our diverse and quirky personalities, making sure every package and item is a reflection of who we are and who we strive to be. We like to think you get a piece of Personnia and a piece of Kyla through every transaction. We hope to expand our reach even further. We want to grow our business so we can better support our family and what’s important to us. We’d like to support organizations that spread autism awareness, breast cancer awareness, suicide awareness, and organizations that uplift black voices. All of these are very important causes that we personally relate to so our goal is to grow so we can more easily give back to our community. We’ll keep putting ourselves out there and accepting opportunities as they come. We’ve started to see the impact that all of our hard-work can have. We know that if we keep striving for success, one day we’ll look back and know that it was all worth it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
We travel all over Florida! As we’re crafty people, we like visiting places with scenic backdrops and creative auras. Because we like to use the world around us as inspiration, many of our pieces are influenced by the beach. We recommend any beach spots! Places such as Hanna Park and Huguenot Memorial Park have great historical value. We also like museums such as The Museum of Science & History and Cummer Museum. When concerts are back in session, we love to go local but don’t mind traveling to The Fillmore to see our favorite K-pop artists. Good places to eat are Singleton’s Seafood Shack and Conch House Marina. There are good people everywhere! Walking down the strip and seeing people dancing under the neon lights. Going to a jazz festival and intermingling with all the diverse backgrounds that come, it’s great to just soak in what everyone has to offer.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
A wonderful artist we’ve befriended in the small business owner community is a family ran company by the name of Oak Ring. They create pens by repurposing dead wood and try to make pens more accessible for those with disabilities. They travel a lot for in person work as well as sell online. https://www.instagram.com/oakringpens/ https://www.etsy.com/shop/Oakring?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=772213737

Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/PersonniaAndKyla
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3t.factory/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/3tFactory
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/3TFactory
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbxWdYXX7gJKJlcccGsuzpA
Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@3t.factory

Image Credits
Personnia Rawls Kyla Hunter