Meet Jamie Beals Ketelsen | Designer & Sewist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jamie Beals Ketelsen and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jamie, how has your work-life balance changed over time?
In life, it’s easy to get lost in the day to day grind and lose sight of family or even business relationships. Work too much, spend too little time with the family, end up disconnected and unattached. Ignore a customer for family reasons and cause a lack of trust and reliability in that relationship. Either of these things will have a negative impact on your life. My name is Jamie and I am the owner and Master Sewist of Heartbeat Clothing. My husband is Nick and he’s the founder of You are Not Marketing. Our daughter is 9-year-old Devi, the creator of HeArtbeat by Devi. In our family, we’ve taken a unique approach to work that includes all of our businesses in very unique ways. This has allowed us to create valuable experiences for our family while spending more time than ever, together. To make more family time, we have incorporated our daughter’s homeschooling into our business. This has provided her valuable experiences, through which we have taught her about money, recurring income, and entrepreneurship. We knew that to keep our family connected, we had to include her. We leveraged our daughter’s desire to make YouTube videos by asking her if she would be willing to be Heartbeat Clothing’s model. She instantly asked us how much the pay was with the thought of how many toys she could buy. When I pitched her the idea of doing it for 5 dollars, she laughed. To us, this was a chance to teach her about money. To her, it was a chance to buy a toy pony. What ensued was a relationship in which she chose to make the video, and we pay her on our business’s performance. This has allowed us to introduce her to entrepreneurship while teaching her more about money than most kids will ever learn. In turn, this has helped instill more balance in our family life by giving us more time together while enriching her education. Because her income is performance-based, she has been seeing passive income regularly. It was an ingenious way to get her attention and inspire her interest in business. This made her wonder what more she could do to earn cash. She decided to take up finger knitting and has made her own handmade scarf business profitable in a few short months. Since then, on her own accord, she joined a Kidpreneur class and has graduated from the program. Not only has she completed that series of classes, she decided to join the Kid Boss Kidpreneur weekly support group and pay for it herself. With both of her parents working from home as entrepreneurs and her interest in entrepreneurship, finding balance is so much easier for our family. We all work together and our businesses complement each other.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My grandmother taught me the basics of sewing when I was around my daughter’s age. Now I’m passing that love along to her, by making her clothing. I enjoy creating custom items for people that fit well and make them happy. When Covid became an issue here, people began asking me to sew facemasks. I was fairly resistant as there wasn’t a lot of reliable or clear info on how to make facemasks and what materials would be best, not to mention supplies were hard to come by. But it became clear that there was a need and I had a skill, so we began. Since March, I’ve been sewing 7 days a week, often up to 16 hours per day and have employed 2 women. We still barely keep up but we are committed to our next business day shipping and excellent customer service. I’ve learned that the universe speaks loud and clear when it wants you to listen, and when it does, you surrender to that and you do what you need to do with your whole heart. It isn’t always going to be easy, but it will always be worth it when you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
When my best friend visits, we will go to the Salton Sea to Salvation Mountain and East Jesus, as well as the surrounding points of interest. We will go visit Glamis for a day trip with the CanAm. We’ll visit Ocean Beach for the farmer’s market and will eat at all the cool food trucks we can find. Of course, we will make sure her family gets their fill of the best Mexican food in the US!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Shakti Rising – for supporting me in reclaiming my life so I could grow into a successful and happy person

Website: https://iloveheartbeat.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/i_love_heartbeat/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lifeinheartbeat
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iloveheartbeatclothing/
Youtube: https://youtube.com/user/puredubs
Other: https://www.pinterest.com/Heartbeat_Clothing/_shop/ – Pinterest https://g.page/Heartbeat-Clothing?gm. – Google My Business