February 18, 2025

Karenmillen Outlet

Solutions for Success

A Pittsburgh Sewing Network Shows How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive in Place

A Pittsburgh Sewing Network Shows How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive in Place

With her upcycled products and distributed production model, one self-taught seamstress is proof that small-scale manufacturing can boost a neighborhood’s economic resilience.

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This piece is part of a new series on women entrepreneurs addressing community and economic development needs through small-scale manufacturing.

Despite no formal sewing training and few successful entrepreneurship examples in her neighborhood, Pittsburgh-based entrepreneur Nisha Blackwell has spent the last 10 years using her love of sewing to show her community that successful entrepreneurship is possible. Her boutique bowtie company Knotzland, upcycling rescued textiles and materials into high-quality bows through a distributed production model, shows how small-scale manufacturing can bring new life to struggling neighborhoods.

Surrounded by rolls of fabric in blues, golden yellows and emerald greens, Blackwell works in the early morning light to pack the cut materials for 450 bowties to be sewn by her team over the next week. She looks at every package to ensure it includes the exact materials and instructions that each of her 29 sewing network members – or “sewists” – will need to create the top-notch bowtie Blackwell promises her customers: paper cutout, model bowtie, stitching details so that every bow is a perfect match.

Her entrepreneurial success these past nine years, despite the challenges of the pandemic and the national struggles for storefronts in general, is a testament to her creativity and perseverance. It’s also a case study in how small-scale manufacturing businesses – selling online, in-person, wholesale and at local events – boost a neighborhood’s economic resilience.

Read our previous coverage of Knotzland: This Maker Is Helping to Build a More Inclusive Movement

Raised between the Wilkinsburg and Homewood neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, Blackwell remembers the neighborhood struggling throughout her childhood. Home to families like the Carnegies in the 1880s, Homewood became the center of Pittsburgh’s Black community during the 1950s and ‘60s when families were pushed out of other areas due to redlining. Torn apart by riots in the ‘60s after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the neighborhood never bounced back and witnessed the same withdrawal of investment seen in many cities and neighborhoods across the country. Home to high unemployment and low median incomes, Homewood is working on a community comeback, but it still struggles.

Adopted at a young age, Blackwell watched her grandmother respond to the neighborhood struggles with charity and compassion. They would go thrifting regularly. But it wasn’t just about buying things: her grandmother saw it as an exercise in community care. They would buy large bags of inexpensive items to share with friends and neighbors, and her grandmother would invite people over to pick from the haul.

Memories like this infused Blackwell with a desire to give back to the community that raised her. As a young adult, she saw her original plan for a nursing career as a way to make a difference. But one thing kept sticking in her mind. The women in her neighborhood were entrepreneurial, creating businesses that sold food or jewelry or other hand-made items, but their businesses never stuck. Why couldn’t someone from their community be a successful entrepreneur?

In 2014, she realized she had no money to buy a present for a friend’s little girl whose birthday party was quickly approaching. She dug out a few thrifted shirts for material, pulled up videos on YouTube, and began to teach herself how to sew hair bows as a gift. When she left the party with six commissions for custom hair bows, something clicked: She would be the successful entrepreneur her neighborhood needed. She would show them what was possible – and help others make money, too.

No one in her circle knew anyone from the community who had succeeded as a creative entrepreneur. Not knowing much about how to start a business, Blackwell applied to Ascender, a local business accelerator, and was accepted. It was exciting, but hard: classes all day, followed by an eight-hour restaurant hostess shift, and even more hours at home working on her business.

But it paid off. In 2019, her business moved into a storefront. Then, in 2021, the Carnegie Museum of Art called with an order for 70 custom bowties created from museum-grade fabric for an upcoming exhibition on local craft artisans. That elevated recognition of her work, and that of her sewists, to a new level.

Throughout its history, Knotzland has continued to grow and thrive, thanks to three key decisions along the way:

Studying her market. Working with her mentor at Ascender, Blackwell realized that the market for hair bows was unlikely to grow, but the bespoke menswear market was poised to explode over the next decade. So, she chose to focus almost exclusively on creating fine bowties for special events like weddings and establishing large corporate partnerships that would create a more predictable and steady revenue flow. During the pandemic, a quick pivot to producing masks for large organizations allowed her to remain open.

Building a network. Blackwell employs 29 sewists throughout the region who help produce Knotzland’s products. This distributed production model means that she can fill large orders quickly, and it offers greater business resilience since production is close to home. The network also creates an entrepreneurial ripple effect: The sewists can take what they learn from her and apply it to their own entrepreneurial endeavors.

Bringing the community along. Now an instructor at Catapult PGH, Blackwell teaches a 12-month startup-to-storefront course for minority business owners who want to start or grow their storefront businesses – in their own neighborhoods, she hopes. This is another benefit of small-scale manufacturing: Business owners tend to be deeply rooted in their communities, and thus collaborate with their neighbors and other local business owners.

For Blackwell, the ultimate goal is to show her community that homegrown entrepreneurs can thrive and remain there. As she says, “The most important return on my investment is helping my community.”

Ilana Preuss is Founder and CEO of Recast City and author of Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing (Island Press, 2021).

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