Meghan McCloskey, founder of Craft + Boogie.

Life is funny. You can sit in a cubicle across from someone for the better part of a year, yet learn more about them in a sixty-minute interview seven years later at a coffee shop.

When I found out my old Nike coworker started a children’s craft kit company, I thought she must have been daydreaming about this business from behind her cubicle walls all those years ago. After all, don’t most entrepreneurs pine for the day they can leave their corporate jobs and make their big dream a reality?

Not the case for Meghan McCloskey.

“I was never daydreaming about it,” she said. “I never had a desire to make a business, and I never planned to make a business. Even when I started doing it, I didn’t have a plan to make it a business.”

When Meghan said these few sentences just minutes into our interview, I knew I was going to enjoy our time together. She has the gift of infectious honesty and the ability to make you feel comfortable and confident in her presence. Without a lot of prompting, Meghan openly shared her successes and failures and how she’s learning and growing every day as a business owner, spouse, and mom of three.

What, then, gave her the spark to take her passion of creating special moments for her own children and turn it into something tangible she could offer to others?

A cup of coffee is the answer.

A high school friend asked Meghan to coffee as she was preparing for her second child, and she wanted advice and inspiration from Meghan who worked full-time and still managed to produce extremely creative and festive memories for her family.

“Then we got to talking about all the stuff she was seeing [me post] on Instagram and she said, ‘Well, I want to do that for my kids, can you just make something for me?’” Meghan said. “And she was like the fifth person to ask that—and I told her that. And she said, ‘Well, you should just put little boxes together and sell them at the Nike farmers’ markets.’”

Though selling something she created at a farmers’ market didn’t appeal to Meghan, it definitely got her wheels turning, and she agreed to do *something* because she said she couldn’t ignore that the universe was telling her to follow through on this.

Meghan drafted an email and sent it to all the mom friends she had at her place of business, which happened to be Nike World Headquarters. She said pretty much everyone replied “yes” right away.

“It was 24 boxes I sold right away,” she said. “I remember my very first box [sold to] a coworker sitting right next to me. Even then I didn’t plan for it to be a business, it was just something fun to do on the side.”

Rewinding just a bit, I think it’s important to dive into the imaginative and intentional life Meghan and her husband were creating (and, of course, continue to create) that caused friends to take note and beg for Meghan to drum up some kind of crafty magic for their kids, too.

Meghan and her kids, Maddox, Evie, and Jack.

If you want to rewind even further, Meghan will tell you it started with her mom who used to pack every holiday with celebrations and traditions for Meghan and her sisters—everything from the food to the decorations and the crafts they’d make together. Meghan knew she wanted to carry those traditions and feelings into her version of motherhood.

“I’ve just always been doing stuff with my kids,” she said. “I love doing fun breakfast parties and going all-out with celebrations, and I’ve always loved to do crafts—and not even because I consider myself a crafty person, I actually don’t—I consider myself very much into quality time together as a family.

“There’s so many distractions all the time with phones and TVs and now [for my family], even getting into sports practices, we’re just so busy, so carving out time to spend together as a family is always what I’ve been into. So, for me, that translates into these celebrations. I’ve just always been doing that.”

Literally boxing up that magic as “Meghan’s Craft Kits” for her first two dozen customers brought Meghan so much joy that she knew she wanted to offer another kit.

“But after the next one, I was kind of like, This is hard. I was working full-time, I had the three kids, and then I just would spend nights putting this stuff together. It was so much work, I was like, Why am I doing this?”

After listening to a How I Built This podcast about the founder of the TOMS shoe company and his one-for-one business model, Meghan got inspired, which gave her the motivation to keep going with her craft kits. She decided for every craft kit she sold, she was going to donate one to a local foster care resource center, With Love.

Bringing joy and creating the feelings of magic and creativity for children who don’t have permanent families and who are in new environments became Meghan’s “why,” and transformed her approach to her business (which by this point was really becoming a “business,” even if Meghan didn’t see it that way).

Meghan is incredibly humble about the growth and success of her business, now called Craft + Boogie. She said most of her marketing has been word of mouth, friends telling friends.

“It was all super natural and kept growing, and then we started the one-for-one thing, but after about a year, we couldn’t even do the one-for-one thing because there were so many orders.”

With Love couldn’t even accept all of Meghan’s donations as they weren’t serving as many families then as they are now, so she started reaching out and serving several other nonprofits in the Portland area. And in June of this year, Craft + Boogie started offering free kits to any foster family who requested one all across the United States.

Meghan hosts work parties to assemble the kits for foster families, and they’ve become so popular they fill up almost immediately. She’s currently in the process of setting up a nonprofit branch of her business to hopefully serve even more families in the future.

Genuinely fueled by the long-term goal “to make people happy,” Meghan said Craft + Boogie has grown based on the demands and desires of its customers rather than a firm strategy.

“I don’t consider myself a business person at all, and I don’t even have that entrepreneurial spirit,” she said. “I’m just sort of riding the wave of this. … I just recently started meeting with mentors and a CPA to help with the nonprofit stuff. ... It’s just been such tiny baby steps. Only little step at a time, always from what people are asking me, always out of demand. The strategy is: Give people what they want.”

Whether that was the idea for an airplane busy kit or a wedding day craft kit, or even the ability to purchase a year-long subscription to Craft + Boogie, so very many of the available craft kits have come from customer requests. As the ideas kept coming, the orders did, too, and Meghan began to burn out.

Meghan and her husband, Jeff, celebrating Fourth of July.

After trying to keep up with all the things all by herself for a year, Meghan hired her first employee for six hours per week. But her feelings of overwhelm did not disappear, and it started affecting her physically. She knew she needed to make a serious change, so she set a goal of leaving her full-time job several months down the road. Despite having a bit of help, Meghan was still up working on Craft + Boogie until 2 some mornings and sacrificing time with her family on the weekends to fulfil orders. So she left her full-time job a bit sooner than she planned, which translated to immediate relief.

Now Meghan works for herself and her sole employee is alongside full-time. After much trial and error, she’s carved out “working hours” for herself and recently initiated self-imposed rules around technology use as a way to stay more present. She turns her phone off as soon as her husband and kids walk through the door each evening and doesn’t turn it back on until her kids are out the door in the mornings. On Fridays at 5, she clicks off her phone and doesn’t turn it back on until Sunday evening.

“I did it one time,” she said. “I did it just for the evening. It felt so good. When I turn it off, it’s like this weight literally lifted off of me because I know that it’s really addicting for me … because every time I check [my phone], I see that there’s a new order … there’s a twelve-month prepaid subscription … there’s a new note from someone who got something who loves it all. And that stuff is so addicting to me, I love it. So it’s hard not to check it all the time. But it’s just not necessary.

“So now I’ve trained myself to turn it off and just check it once in the morning, after the kids go to school. … I think if you set expectations, just like a brick and mortar store has hours, [like] ‘We will be responding to messages from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacfic Time,’ then people are cool with that—in this sort of business anyway. It’s not urgent.”

Meghan will be the first to tell you that there are exceptions to these rules as she ends up working some evenings after her kids go to bed, and if anyone is away, she’ll keep her phone on for emergencies. The point is the effort and intention behind her “rules.”

So much of Meghan’s story is about intuition, honoring feelings, listening to the universe, and doing what feels right for *her.* In an age of intense competition and comparison, Meghan and her mission to incite quality time among kids and adults is a breath of fresh air.

She said she keeps her “why” top of mind, which helps her stay calm and not stress about goals or financial milestones for her business. She has ideas, plans, and is constantly evolving Craft + Boogie (just take a look at her colorful and continually updated website for ideas and inspiration!), but she’s also able to stay incredibly grounded and realistic about her work.

“I don’t worry about anything that’s going to happen,” she said. “I kind of live by the motto: Leap and the net will appear. It’s all just going to be OK no matter what if you care enough and you’re passionate and driven and you work hard.”

May you, too, have the courage to leap the next time you feel you can no longer ignore an idea, voice in your head, or nudge from a friend. You never know where it could lead you.

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IN HER WORDS:

Where do you get your energy/what motivates you?

“I get my energy from my kids. Not only because they have a ton of energy themselves but because they’re kids—i just love that they say what’s on their minds, and they’re so honest and they see this magic in the world, and they’re so innocent. I just love the way their faces light up when they see these boxes of things. Seeing that makes me motivated.”

Other females who inspire you?

“Allie Roth is the founder of With Love. She’s been meeting with me, and she’s always sort of been my mentor in a way. She’s given me some great advice, and I just love her passion for what she’s doing. She really inspires me, and she’s someone right here in our community. She started her organization in her house, too, and it’s grown to this amazing thing.

“Elizabeth Gilbert is someone who really inspires me. I love everything she writes. Her book Big Magic… I read that when I started doing [Craft + Boogie], and it’s all about an idea coming to you; that an idea is a living breathing thing floating around looking for someone to take hold of it and bring it to life. I love that she says to dress up for creativity and present yourself seriously to creativity. I just love all of her ideas and her life story.”

Favorite kitchen utensil/can’t live without ingredient?

“Cinnamon! I put cinnamon on everything I give [my kids] in the morning: oatmeal, yogurt, smoothies—and they love it.”

Go-to recipe?

“Pumpkin pie French toast casserole. I make it for Halloween breakfast or Thanksgiving—it’s so easy and delicious.”

STAY TUNED TO L&L FOR THE RECIPE!