HOW I GOT STARTED AS AN ENTREPRENEUR — Anna Schuck

One of our participants has had a story published in the Michigan Family Connections Newsletter. You can read it below!

I’m going to tell you about how I got started as a retailer. It all started when I was about three years old. My mom had gotten some plastic animals for me. I played with those animals a lot, and since I’m blind, the animals helped me to understand what real animals looked like. And since I have autism, my collection of plastic animals has become my passion.
Now jump forward to the year 2015. At this time I was standing in a little toy store in Jackson Mi. I was looking at some plastic animals they had displayed there on the shelf. In previous years, I had seen these figures advertised at Michael’s, and other craft stores. Yet, as I stood there, looking at them then, I started thinking “I wonder where these toy store people get these figures from? I wonder if I could carry these things too?”
And so, my business began. I started selling and ordering in 2016, but for a while before my first order, I had to scrape together $100 in order to make my very first order. Now, my dream has always been to work in a storefront, but that will probably be delayed for a time, perhaps forever, because my autism gets in the way. But in spite of all this, my business has really been the best part of my life.