51. Enabling Creativity, with Luca Cusolito

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Luca talks about crispy tacos, being a third-generation female entrepreneur, and how creative collaborations make her happy

Show Notes

  • Luca LOVES collaborations with other creative professionals, especially people in other industries; she’s passionate about bringing people together and creating opportunities, or collaborating with others
    Moved to Jersey City (from Florida) ten years ago; she started a line of hand-made cosmetics and noticed there wasn’t a craft community, so she brought the Craft Mafia to Jersey City
  • Started getting involved with Etsy when around 2005, and joined the Ft. Lauderdale Craft Mafia; back then there wasn’t a hand-made culture, and people didn’t understand the difference between an artisanal product and one found commercially as there is now
  • Luca was involved with all aspects of her business, from creating the products to the marketing; she quickly learned she enjoys the marketing and branding part of it and that she is good at it. Now she uses this knowledge and skills to help other creative entrepreneurs. Most marketers list what they can do for their clients; Luca likes to enable them to create themselves rather than do it for them (hence, Creative Enabler).
  • Luca is a third-generation female entrepreneur; her great grandmother (who raised four daughters in Texas as a single mother) was a seamstress and owned and operated a grocery store; and her mother has several tax offices in South Florida (along with Luca’s step dad), does marketing for a tax franchise, volunteers with nonprofits, and had a gift basket business for a while—when Luca’s mother went into labor with her, her mother was putting together a handmade chocolate order, and wouldn’t go to the hospital until Luca’s grandfather promised to deliver the order
  • Luca started doing web development because she needed to find a way to publish her creative work and there weren’t self-publishing tools; selling web development helped her pay for her first car
    Eventually, Luca fell into real-estate, but then decided to leave her job to start making cosmetics. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, her family was very supportive.
  • Luca LOVES tacos! Perhaps unhealthily so. The best part is probably the crunch (she’ll do a soft shell, but crispy is where it’s at), but truth be told anything that can work as a vehicle for cheese and jalapeno works

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