Girl pins her business hopes on creatively designed clay

Ask Annemarie Schwendler about her crafts, and she hands you a business card and laments the fact that her website's not up and running yet.

Not bad for an 11-year-old.

Annemarie, a bright sixth-grader at Iroquois Middle School in Schenectady and parishioner of Immaculate Conception Church in Glenville, has had her own business ("AS You Wish") making clay pins, earrings and other trinkets since the humble age of eight.

Can-do in clay

A self-confessed "crafty" kid, she'd already amassed a cabinet full of art supplies and kits when she saw a woman at a craft fair shaping clay into tiny figurines and attaching them to pins.

"I said, `I could do that,'" the young entrepreneur recalled. She convinced her skeptical mother to buy her three colors of clay, and immediately sculpted a blonde angel superimposed on a heart. The fact that she had talent was evident.

From there, Annemarie said it was a matter of "just working" on her new favorite craft. She made everything from hearts to gingerbread men, shaping the tiny pieces of clay, baking them in the oven, glazing them to give them shine and gluing them to pins.

Into business

Adults who wore her art were often stopped and asked where they found the items. Before long, Annemarie was donating pins to craft fairs at local schools and selling them to eager customers -- even local dental hygienists.

"Every time I go to the dentist's office, I bring my pins. It's an odd habit," she remarked, deadpan.

One of her best clients is Girls Inc., a national, nonprofit youth organization that provides educational programs for girls. A neighbor who worked for the group asked Annemarie to design an award pin showing a "strong, smart and bold" girl -- the group's theme -- and the result was so successful that girls in the program now compete to earn the pins.

Customer knows best

Annemarie also makes pins and other items to order. Often, she said, a customer will ask for a specific piece -- a cat in front of a fireplace, for example, or an angel with red hair -- and Annemarie creates a design based on the request.

"The thing I like best about working with clay is seeing people's faces when they actually see [the finished product]: somewhere between, `Oh my gosh, did you actually make this?' and `Wow, that's amazing!'" she said.

Designer

Like many great artists, Annemarie doesn't look at a ball of clay as a blank slate; she knows exactly what she wants to do with it and how to create the design.

"I always have everything in my head before I try it," she said while painstakingly adding teeth to a two-inch-tall monster statue. "I can always seem to picture exactly what I'm going to do before I try it."

Of course, with a business to run, some corners have to be cut. A while back, Annemarie made patterns for a few of her most-requested pins so she didn't have to work at making them perfectly each time.

Family effort

The rest of the Schwendlers have also gotten in on the act. Annemarie's mother makes her business cards and glazes her finished pieces when they come out of the oven; her brother Joseph, an eighth-grader at Christian Brothers Academy in Albany, is her bookkeeper. He keeps track of her sales and talks up her crafts to people at school.

Joseph also offers brotherly advice on her work.

"He does a lot of looking over my shoulder, saying, `That looks nice,' or, `You might want to fix that,'" Annemarie noted. Constructive criticism can be annoying, she admitted, but "I like it, because he's helping."

Growing business

Annemarie still expresses some astonishment at the way her business has taken off. While she loves making the pieces and often has to be forced to put down the clay and pick up her homework, she said that "the more I sell, the more people want! It's sometimes hard to keep up."

In fact, the crafter doesn't plan to expand her business any further. It's too early to be planning a career path, but "I'm not looking at this as, it's going to be my career," she stated firmly. "I would like it to make me money through high school; I don't ever imagine a time when I'm not going to like it. But I don't like it enough to say I'm going to make all my money off this when I grow up."

(Annemarie's pins cost $4 to $5; earrings are $3; statues are $5 and up, depending on size and complexity. Her work will be for sale at a craft festival at Christian Brothers Academy, Albany, Nov. 15, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Contact AS You Wish at 384-0432.)

(11/6/03) [[In-content Ad]]