Home-based Stay Cozy thrives on curiosity, creativity

“Some of the things I do don’t always make business sense,” said Jessica Bass, whose rural Solon, home-based enterprise, Stay Cozy Creative Co., is flourishing — perhaps for that very reason. 

“I like to try things I’m truly curious about, that I haven’t seen before," said the Cedar Rapids Prairie High School graduate, who earned a business marketing degree on a track scholarship at Northern Illinois University. “These are the things that have helped my business grow.”

Grow it has since 2018, when Ms. Bass picked up a plastic loom kit at her mother’s house and knitted and sold her first hat. A photo on Instagram brought hat orders from friends. Ms. Bass suddenly found herself in business. She had recently left the workforce to stay home and raise an adopted daughter. Then she learned she was pregnant. The start-up, she said. filled a need “to do something else with my brain.”  

It also scratched a long-neglected itch for Ms. Bass, who was “really creative with art and drawing” as a child but poured most of her energy into sports during high school and college. The business rekindled her love of creating and working with her hands.

“I made hats all winter,” she said. “When spring came, my husband asked, ‘What are you going to do when it’s not cold and people don’t wear hats?’” 

Tool-free, textile crafts an attraction

Looking around for other product ideas, Ms. Bass was attracted to macramé. The knotted-cord craft many Baby Boomers remember from the 1970s has enjoyed a tech-social media-fueled revival in recent years. Ms. Bass liked the fact that she could create items like plant hangers and wall hangings without tools, using only her hands.

Soon, via a photo of a chunky blanket on Instagram, she found herself learning another tool-free textile craft — hand-knitting — that would drastically change her business.  The photo caption was all in Spanish, so she had to Google for a translation to learn the blanket was made from “tube yarn,” a one-inch diameter, continuous fiber-filled cotton cylinder. 

She hand-knitted and sold her first blanket in March of 2019. The blankets were a social media hit, but the cost of tube yarn was prohibitive. Husband Josh, an experienced entrepreneur in his own right and her biggest supporter, helped her work with manufacturers to buy yarn more cheaply in bulk. A new product was born. Ms. Bass sells Stay Cozy Co. tube yarn at retail and wholesales it to other small businesses.

Business fulfills search for identity, purpose

After college, Ms. Bass had worked mainly in the nonprofit world. She said she lost her identity as a working person when she became a mom. On her entrepreneurial journey, she’s found answers to questions like “Who am I? What am I interested in? What am I going to do with my time?”

Creating her first jumbo stuffie in August 2022 taught her a big lesson about herself. “Instead of the traditional crocheted stuffie, I wondered if I could make those with big yarn,” she recalled. Neither of her first attempts, a dinosaur and a unicorn, sold at market, but a TikTok video of the items “really went crazy.” She spent the whole spring filling custom orders for jumbo stuffies of flamingos, sea horses and panda bears.

“It was really encouraging. In the beginning, I had to make things people wanted. With the stuffies, it was the first time I made something I thought was fun. And people wanted them. I rode that wave as long as it went.”

She also learned that she enjoyed creating custom products more than making multiple copies of the same item to sell on her website. 

Another bit of self-knowledge came from giving up studio space she rented in Cedar Rapids when her son started kindergarten. She and her husband remodeled half of a pole barn on their property into a space for the business.

“It was a great decision,” she said. She eliminated rent expense and shifted classes formerly held at the studio to the Eastern Iowa Arts Academy. “I get to show up and be the teacher. It’s a better use of my energy and expertise.”

Not having to be the host allows her to focus on tutorials, another form of teaching.

“I love to share things that make me happy and help people do things that make them happy,” said Ms. Bass. 

“I had been making tutorials and videos for years. In the last year, I started making tutorials for sale, intentionally.  I now have tutorial products, in addition to lots of free content on YouTube.” 

Ms. Bass records and edits the videos on her phone and adds voice-over instruction after the fact. She is self-taught, drawing on her art minor and high school and college photography classes. “I have an eye for a good picture and how I want things to look," she said.

Chunky granny square video goes viral

Stay Cozy continues to evolve. Ms. Bass created her first chunky granny square blanket and a released a video tutorial that went viral on TikTok and Instagram in the spring of this year.

The social media boost is enabling Ms. Bass to steer the business in a direction she likes. “I want to focus on being online with an in-person aspect. I want a little more freedom and flexibility. Content creation is a big part of the business, and I like being part of the community.”

Giving back locally has been an important to her from the start. “My tagline is 'Stay cozy, creative, and kind,'"Ms. Bass said.” My son had been born premature, so when I started making hats, I used to make and donate one preemie hat to a local hospital for every hat I sold.”

She transitioned to giving 10% of every sale to the Catherine McAuley Center for a few years, and then most recently has been donating handmade goods for fundraisers at her kids' school and the Rally for Reid Foundation. A new initiative is donating $1 from every skein of tube yarn sold to a local nonprofit.  “I just started this and haven't even given my first check yet,” she said.

It's another one of those decisions that may not exactly make business sense, but are part of how Jessica Bass knits success.