craft – Finance News Today

She saved $24,000 to launch a craft festival in an old Joann store

Finance News — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:08:50 +0000

An old Joann fabric and craft store is getting new life, if only for a weekend: Hundreds of Southern Californians are expected to visit in search of new art, clothes, decor and an afternoon of communal crafting.

That’s the mission behind Lauren Tetef’s Open House Creative Fest, which will run June 27 and 28 from the old Joann location at the Del Amo Fashion Center mall in Torrance, California.

The event is part artisan market, part workshop series where guests can learn new skills directly from the makers behind what they’re buying.

“As an attendee, you get a little taste of what somebody does,” says Tetef, 40, a long-time events producer. “You get to sit down and metaphorically break bread with them, have a conversation with them, get to know them. And by doing that, you’re so much more invested in their business.”

A weekend of shopping and crafting

Admission to the Open House Creative Fest event is free to walk around and shop from roughly 25 vendors, each of whom will also host their own crafting workshops. The creatively inclined can purchase an activity passport, starting at $40, which will give them access to do each booth’s activity.

For example, a participating florist plans to host sessions where she’ll guide visitors on arranging dried flowers onto a greeting card for people to keep; another vendor who sells clothes plans to show people how to make a keychain by upcycling old selvage material.

The activity passport will also give shoppers free range at the event’s “activity garden” with tables full of fabric, paper, paints and other art supplies to create their own projects.

“This is my dream come true,” says Tetef, who attended the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles and was inspired by the campus’s free materials library. “I just want to go to a thing where everyone’s sitting down making stuff.”

Saving roughly $24,000 after a layoff

Much like the temporarily revived Joann space, Tetef’s creative fest is a kind of comeback.

In March 2025, Tetef started a corporate marketing job but says the import-heavy business was impacted by the Trump administration’s new tariff policy; Tetef says she was laid off just six months later in August. Despite the unexpected turn of events, she says, “it was a good opportunity for me to figure something out: What do I do next?”

She started brainstorming Open House Creative Fest and sees it as an amalgamation of everything she’s done in her career.

Tetef had previously worked as a director of events and produced dozens of meet-ups, from large-scale pop-up markets to intimate influencer events. About two years ago, she also started her own business, Flourish Locally, which hosts networking events for small businesses and creative workshops like charm-making sessions.

Tetef says she and her family lived off her severance check and her husband’s income. She took on events clients through her own business and put aside all of her earnings to go toward the creative fest, saving roughly…

Craft beer in Canada is losing its fizz, as sales dry up and more breweries

Finance News — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 16:46:26 +0000

After years of seemingly unlimited growth for the craft beer industry, the party is winding down.

Beer sales are down across the board and the number of breweries in Canada has started to decline, a shift driven by a mix of cost pressures and changing consumer tastes and social habits.

“A lot of us who’d been in it since the start of the small breweries knew at some point there had to be a bit of a correction,” said Ben Leon, co-founder and CEO of Dandy Brewing in Calgary.

“We weren’t going to ride this rocket ship forever.”

But while the 2010s hype around craft beer might be over, there are still businesses finding success by offering different drinks and taking a more expansive view of what a brewery can be.

Goodbye to the golden age

In 2014, Leon opened his brewery’s first location inside a tiny warehouse space in the city’s north-east.

It was good timing. All over North America, millennials were going crazy for craft beer, and in Alberta, the government had recently changed rules to help microbreweries get their product to market.

“There was a huge thirst in Alberta for craft beer,” said Leon, who recalls getting emails about new breweries opening nearly every week. “It was a pretty wild time.”

A similar trend was unfolding across the country in the 2010s, with craft breweries opening at a rapid clip.

Their taprooms were popular with both customers and governments, who saw craft breweries as a source of economic stimulus and a way to revitalize rural areas and dilapidated downtowns, according to the Canadian Craft Brewers Association.

Ben Leon, co-founder and CEO of Dandy Brewing, pictured at the brewery in Calgary’s Inglewood neighbourhood. (Paula Duhatschek/CBC)

“It was almost as though anybody who had a dream of opening a brewery, or maybe who won an amateur brewing competition and they were running a little craft brewery, like, out of their garage, suddenly had the opportunity to say, ‘I’m going to get behind this,'” said Christine Comeau, the association’s executive director.

“There [was] a lot of excitement, a lot of funding behind it.”

The golden age of craft beer kept humming through the late 2010s into the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 2017 and 2022, the number of breweries in Canada climbed from 676 to 1165, according to beer writer and analyst Jason Foster, who tracks the number.

Craft beer on the shelves of a liquor store in Vancouver, pictured in 2019. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

Breweries, beer sales shrinking

But the party couldn’t last forever.

After years of rapid growth, the number of breweries in Canada has flattened out and started to contract, according to Foster’s analysis. The number of breweries in Canada declined by 2.9 per cent in 2025 and 3.4 per cent the year before, he said.

“The decade before, the growth was so dramatic that seeing an end to that growth, in and of itself, is significant,” said Foster, who is also an Edmonton-based university professor and think-tank director.

“You have to be on top of…