Heather Ferman Flamework Beads

In her studio in Jacksonville, Heather Ferman creates unique one-of-a-kind art glass creations, mainly jewelry, by hand. She also works in sterling silver, fabricating settings for some of her glass work. Her main technique is to use a blowtorch to melt both glass and silver to create her pieces which she sells online in her Etsy shop and at art shows.

Heather started her career nearly 40 years ago working in clay as a potter. In 2003, she attended an artist conference at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. She tried glass there and was instantly hooked and started taking as many classes in glass art as possible. She fell in love with glass as a medium and made a bold decision to convert her studio from pottery to glass. She took classes at Corning (the mecca for glass in the U.S.) with many prestigious teachers. She also took classes in Murano, Italy (the world’s leading glass art center) with some of the leaders in the field.

After just a few years of training, she was able to reach a high level in her new field. She became the only American glass artist to have been featured in Bead Review three consecutive years (Bead Review showcased the top 40 glass art beads in the world each year it was published).

Over the next several years, Heather had success selling at art shows and was honored when Corning started selling her art glass jewelry in their museum gift shop. However, the financial recession in 2009 and the subsequent invasion of cheap “knock-off” glass art jewelry from China led to difficult times for art shows and glass art in general. Even prior to COVID many glass artists had to close their studios. She was lucky to have the skill set to keep creating her work and selling to museum gift shops and at shows.

Then COVID completely disrupted her business. She was not able to sell at any art shows and gift shop sales dropped to almost nothing. She had to completely reinvent the business around e-commerce. As someone who focuses on working all day with a 3000-degree flame, she had no social media marketing skills, so, she went to the SBDC for help.

She watched several SBDC webinars related to digital marketing, but the biggest benefit from the SBDC was the outstanding one-on-one consulting. Heather’s SBDC consultants provided specific advice on how to improve her website and drive sales to her ETSY store. “They showed me the important elements I needed within the background of my website to make me more visible in Google searches, such as optimizing my SEOs and leveraging Google Analytics. They also taught me how to utilize social media marketing via Facebook and Instagram to implement marketing plans and how to utilize the calendar within META to schedule marketing campaigns” she says of her consultant’s advice.

“Now I am pleased to share the news that sales on my ETSY store are steadily improving and I can see the potential to meet my online goals. Recently, for the first time, I was the #1 ranked glass artist on ETSY in weekly sales. It is still a challenge to get my share of views, favorites and followers and stay up to date with the right keywords as well as list new art pieces every day. But with the help of the SBDC I feel I am close to being able to call myself a successful online seller.”

Heather had great things to say about her experience with the SBDC – “The SBDC is a completely free resource that helps your small business succeed. The value I have received from the SBDC is incredible. They have many great resources such as free webinars on a variety of useful topics. But the best thing about the SBDC is the one-on-one consulting with experts in various fields. I specifically needed help with e-commerce and I was able to engage with a SBDC consultant who had deep knowledge about how to drive online sales. It is almost hard to believe but the expert consulting you receive from the SBDC is absolutely free with no strings attached.”