Crafting a niche of her own

Ann Austin opened Craft Corner in Abu Dhabi after being unable to find supplies locally for her hobby. Her small business has succeeded in building a clientele of both expats and Emiratis, but it is not quite all smooth sailing.

Ann Austin, who moved to the UAE in 1992, says that her Emirati customers at Craft Corner are interested in decoupage and scrapbooking for weddings and baby showers. Mona Al Marzooqi / The National

When Ann Austin came to Abu Dhabi in 1992, she was looking for a craft supplier to feed her hobby of craft making but could not find one place to cater to all her needs. So 10 years later the California native decided to set up her own business, Craft Corner, a three-room shop on Airport Road.

Ann and her assistant Geetha Wanigasekara run the shop, which is one of many small businesses that are growing in the capital.

Ann started her journey with craft making back in the United States, where she took on stitching, then scrapbooking, then craft making, while she was employed as a social security worker, having studied political science. She would come back with a suitcase full of products for her hobby, which she finds relaxing.

Small and medium enterprises such as Craft Corner are a vital part of the UAE economy, contributing 60 per cent of the UAE non-oil economy and including 90 per cent of businesses.

The sector employs more than 42 per cent of workers, with the Ministry of Economy predicting that SMEs will account for 70 per cent of the country's GDP by 2021.

Ms Austin’s shop relies on business from both Emiratis and expats who are increasingly interested in her products, which are mostly imported from the United States, but also from Italy.

“Before it was only expats. Now we have a good percentage of Emiratis. I can say the percentage is 50-50,” she says. “It happened to change within the last five years. In 2010 it was 25 per cent Emiratis.”

The Emirati customers are becoming interested in a medium called decoupage, which is the art of decorating objects by using paper with paints and other materials.

“They [Emiratis] are mostly into gift boxes more than they are making cards. They are going to put candies, sweets, whatever as gifts, as favours,” she says.

Emiratis are also keen on scrapbooking for baby showers or birthday parties.

“They are all over the internet, seeing all the different videos of how to do it and what people are doing and they want to do the same and do it better,” she says. “You have a higher percentage of them wanting to do decoupage and they are selling it. A lot of them are selling on Instagram and many of them are selling online.”

She says Emiratis usually do a lot of decoupage for Arabic coffee pots, called dellah, coffee cups, tea cups and Arabic incense burners called madkhans.

Arab expats do a lot of scrapbooking, she says, while westerners enjoy card making.

But the biggest trend in the past two years is mixed media, which is currently Ms Austin’s favourite.

“What you would normally do with a canvas is you would paint it with a picture and you are done,” says Ms Austin. “But in the last few years you would take a canvas and take some time to paint and just kind of swirl it all over the place. You are not making a picture, you are making a background, then you might take some papers or napkins and you would start to put that in different areas because now you have used two mediums. Then you might take some metal, beads or stamps, stencils, because you are using something from all the different areas on one thing. It’s like a piece of art, your own art.”

In addition to the craft shop, Ms Austin runs classes once a month, but she would like to have two to three classes running each day if she gets a bigger shop.

But running a small business in Abu Dhabi can be a struggle. Rents are high and that means Craft Corner is stuck in a mezzanine floor, which is much cheaper than having a ground floor shop, where signage is visible.

“We can’t find affordable rent and we are not able to move down and pay Dh350,000 to Dh400,000 a year, and we still want to be here to help people find what they want,” says Ms Austin.

“I can’t move to a mall because you can’t afford the rent, even though it has good parking and will get you a lot of foot traffic. I would love to move to a place where we have more space and where we could have a proper classroom and more display area for more products and parking for our customers.

“I think it would be cool if there was an area in Abu Dhabi for small businesses that had a lot of space and affordable rent.”

Ms Austin says she is also facing competition from other shops opening up in malls, which are on the rise in Abu Dhabi. L’atelier des Arts in Marks and Spencer Mall in Abu Dhabi is one such competitor.

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