Meet Liz Leatherbury of Bird and Pear in San Antonio

Today we’d like to introduce you to Liz Leatherbury.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Liz. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
This all began in 2015 with a pile of Mexican Dresses on a table at a Garage Sale. They had hardly been worn so I swooped them up and decided I was going to “make something” out of all that gorgeous, hand embroidered fabric. At that time, I was making and selling jewelry on Etsy so when I had made some decorative pillows out of the old dresses, I put them up on the site. We had such an amazing response that I am now making several things out of the recycled and new Mexican and Latin American textiles such as pennants, fabric cuff bracelets and can coolers. We strive to keep every possible scrap of handworked fabric out of the waste cycle by using all of the little pieces along with the larger ones we utilize for pillows. From our beginnings on Etsy, we have launched our own website and retail shop in downtown San Antonio. We routinely ship all over the world and have a great business in many faraway places like California and Australia.

We were invited to take part in San Antonio’s OPEN pop up shop program in October of 2016 in a historic building in downtown San Antonio and have had a fantastic welcome from customers and the many tourists who pass through this part of town while enjoying the river walk. Since I couldn’t really expand any further in my house and had long ago ceded my garage space for storage, we jumped at the chance to combine the working studio with a retail set-up in front. We are now located in a small house in historic La Villita. We offer our house made goods as well as several other lines of gifts, personal care, artisanal candles and other items that are often made right here in Texas.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I would say it has been a pretty smooth road with only a few bumps along the way. The main struggles I have faced are the ones faced by other small businesses all across the country: How to be competitive in this digital age? How to find capital l to expand? How to find employees who want to grow with your business all while not losing your focus and mission along the way. I have been on one side or another of the retail game for my entire career but I have to say that the online shopping arena is an entirely new dimension in retail sales. It is no longer enough to have the smiliest people behind the register, the cutest merchandise or the most fabulous looking store. These days you have to tick all of those boxes and still be able to combine all of those things into an online presence that is interesting, intriguing and well presented. As fast as people scroll through digital images these days, the ones you put out there have to be that much better to get them to stop and see what you are all about. On any given day, I might oversee production in our studio, ship several orders, generate social media content, help customers, respond to messages from social media channels, do displays and plan for the content for the rest of the week. It is a fully integrated part of our business.

Please tell us about Bird and Pear.
We up-cycle and repurpose embroidered Mexican Dresses and other textiles from Latin and South America. We are doing our very best to bring these traditional handicrafts to a new audience by turning them into new, more modern forms that might appeal to a younger audience. These styles of embroidery and weaving take literally years to learn and I just simply do not want these to be lost to our world. By widening our audience, we can educate an entirely new generation about what it takes to make these products by hand. The effort, design skills and techniques are not something cranked out by a machine. Somebody sits and stitches or weaves each one by hand.

I am most proud of the fact that we can rescue these embroidered items from the landfill. That we can practice mindful construction and keep as much from every facet of production out of the waste cycle as possible. Too, I am extremely proud of the fact that we make a market for these textiles and create jobs both for the stitchers and for the seamstresses in our studio.

I think what sets us apart from other companies is our old-fashioned commitment to customer service in every aspect of our business. I am so very saddened by the retail climate these days wherein customers almost expect to be poorly treated by businesses. They are often almost confrontational when we call or ask them questions so that we can get an order just right. They are often so taken aback when we tell them that we are just checking that they liked something or that, “yes, we would be happy to take that back.” I remember helpful sales clerks who weren’t pushy, nicely wrapped packages and stores who would do almost anything to keep a customer happy. We try to be that store or online shopping experience every day even in this new modern world.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
My favorite memory from childhood was going to my Grandfather’s furniture store in Downtown Fort Worth on a Saturday. He was located in a huge old building on Main Street in downtown Ft. Worth. The entire store had either Terrazo crushed marble floors or concrete and he used to let us roller skate all up and down the aisles! We would go zipping by whatever customer was standing in the aisles shopping for a new bed, bounce off the mattresses leaning against the walls and fly back the other way. It was an absolute blast!

Contact Info:

• Address: Bird and Pear
  418 Villita Street, Building 25
  San Antonio, Texas 78205
• Website: www.thebirdandpear.com
• Phone: 210-263-9969
• Email: liz@thebirdandpear.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/birdandpear
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/thebirdandpear
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/bird-and-pear-san-antonio-2

Image Credit:
Bird and Pear

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