Gen Zers are becoming first-time entrepreneurs - at the mall
Madison Butler just celebrated a milestone work anniversary. The 23-year-old hit her one-year mark as an entrepreneur about a month ago and said she couldn’t be happier. So much so that she’s already working on plans to quickly expand her business.
At 21, Butler became a franchisee of Glendale, California-based Color Me Mine, a nationwide chain of paint-your-own-pottery studios where customers of all ages can personalize their choice of unpainted ceramic pieces — plates, mugs, bowls, figurines, etc. — with their own colors and designs.
”I love talking to my customers, just the process and the routine of it all,” she said in an interview with Bagable.com. Butler’s Color Me Mine studio is located in Arlington Highlands, an open-air lifestyle and shopping center located in Arlington, Texas, and only 20 minutes away from her home.
Her store gets a mix of adults and children, “but we sway way more adults,” she said. “We have some people who come in on their own, or in friend groups, and we also do date nights and team building events,” Butler said.
Like herself, many of her customers are Gen Zers who are actively seeking out fun analog IRL experiences to counteract their digital fatigue. Ironically, they still need the digital push to unplug, she explained.
“A lot of people come in because of social media. Our TikTok bio has our phone number. They call and ask about the experience, and how it works,” she said. “Or they check out our TikTok and Instagram for inspiration.”
Butler said she’s been working on a fruit pattern series and posting her designs online.
“I painted a plate in baby yellow color with blueberries and that video kind of took off. So we decided to make more videos like that. It’s cool when customers come in after spotting our videos and want to remake what they saw,” she said. “They make their own videos, tag us, and that helps spread awareness about our location.”
This quintessentially Gen Z approach to marketing is working for Butler.
“Our traffic has grown so much over time. We’re a walk-in studio but we have people coming in all day long. We receive about 1,000 to 1,500 customers a month,” Butler said, adding that her first studio, which has a staff of eight, is already profitable in its first year.
That’s not bad for a newbie entrepreneur who didn’t initially plan on becoming a business owner. “I started as a part-time employee at a Color Me Mine in Plano, Texas when I was going to University of Texas at Dallas,” said Butler, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology.
At work, she quickly found her footing. Within four months of being hired as an entry-level associate, she was promoted to the next level, and five months after that, to a managerial position.
It’s the on-the-ground real life experience she needed to ultimately figure out her career path. “I wanted to pursue art therapy, but I loved my work experience at Color Me Mine. It was my mom who suggested that I look into ownership if I liked it that much,” Butler said.
Butler co-owns her Color Me Mine studio with her stepfather. “We both invested financially, about $80,000 together,” she said. She hopes to open a second location in the near future.
Young adults want to be their own boss
Gen Zers, like Butler, are showing a keen interest in starting their own businesses.
While more than one in four Americans (27%) say they’ve seriously considered starting a business in the past 12 months, that number jumps to 51% among Gen Zers, and far higher than the next most-likely age group, millennials, according to a recent LendingTree report.
An uncertain job market and wanting more control over their financial future are among the catalysts driving young Americans to pursue entrepreneurship, the report said.
Butler relates to this and knows peers and friends who share this sentiment.
“Do you want to put in time for someone else’s company or do you want to put in time for yourself, towards your dream?” said Butler. “I feel like a lot of young people are thinking about their long-term goals and passions and pursuing them instead of falling into a nine-to-five job just for the paycheck.”
Teresa Johnson, CEO of Color Me Mine (owned by parent company Twist Brands LLC) said she’s seeing a rush of interest in Color Me Mine both from younger customers who are turning to crafting options as a means to socialize offline and from young aspiring entrepreneurs.
“I can tell you what you can’t do when you’re painting pottery, with a brush in one hand and a ceramic piece in the other. You can’t be on your phone,” Johnson said in an interview with Bagable.com.
Johnson owned a handful of independent paint-your-own pottery studios in the early 2000s before she became co-owner and CEO of Color Me Mine in 2021 and a co-owner of Twist Brands.
“Early on it was such a family business. When I opened my first one, my daughter was seven,” Johnson said. “When she was 15, she opened her own brick-and-mortar pottery studio and went to college on a scholarship to study entrepreneurship.”
She describes Color Me Mine as a “multigenerational concept.” “The customer that I had 20 years ago, the 25-year-old mom with a seven-year-old, that child is now 27 and bringing their kids. It’s very nostalgic and sentimental,” she said.
More recently, Johnson is striving to expand the business beyond its predominantly mall-based locations to other options, such as outdoor lifestyle centers and urban neighborhoods. The business currently operates 146 locations in the US and Canada.
“We’re growing and I have a goal to get to 300 units in the next four years,” she said. “The [franchisee] demand is coming from our customer base who enjoy the experience and go back to their corporate jobs and think maybe I should think about owning my own business.”
These customers are millennials, and increasingly, Gen Zers. Johnson notes Butler as among her youngest franchisees.
“I met another one recently, a young married couple in their early 20s. One went to law school and decided that work was not for her,” she said. “There’s also a lot of couples with young kids who want to teach them about small business from the ground up.”
“We don’t want our franchisees to just have a new job,” said Johnson. “We want them to live a life that involves their family, and involves doing what they love.”
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