Welcome to the Business Boot-Up Edition of The Dreamers and Doers Podcast! We believe you are never too young to start a business. We’re bringing you live interviews from the Norman Farmer’s Market in Norman, OK. Each episode will feature one of our student-run businesses where they will be sharing what they’ve learned by starting a business to encourage you to start yours too!

Powered by the Norman Chamber of Commerce and Sponsored by First United Bank.

Justin Bennett: Turbo Beads

TurboBeads is a video tutorial series on YouTube teaching the craft of beads. What originally started out as a small passion project has expanded into something much larger.  Justin Bennett, the creator of this video series, started out at a young age crafting with beads and many other visual arts forms, In highschool he took up media/video broadcasting learning how to film and edit. In this timeframe, Justin decided to combine arts & crafts with the video and editing skills acquired to make a simple bead tutorial,” How to make a bead lizard”. As a couple of years had gone by, in 2008 Justin uploaded this tutorial along with the other video projects from highschool media class to YouTube. Not thinking much about these video uploads, it never occurred to Justin that they’d be videos to be watched or popular. In 2009 the bead lizard video started to gain traction and some friends started to take notice of the attention it was receiving and encouraged Justin to continue with video/arts. In 2010 the video “How to make a bead Lizard” had reached Over 60k views, After seeing the exponential growth of this video, it was clear that there was something interesting to be seen. Several years Later, July 2015, Justin Bennett finally decided to return to YouTube creating more bead videos/tutorial and giving an official name to the bead Tutorials, (TurboBeads)

Jo Clinkenbeard: Crochet Jo

Crochet Jo is a custom order, handmade crochet item company. Jo’s vision is to start a leadership organization for teens and young adults that want to learn crochet, developing confidence in themselves by creating items for homeless shelters, nursing homes, and animal shelters.

Jo created Crochet Jo because of her passion for crochet and gained a lot of confidence while learning this skill. She loves to see the look on people’s faces when they see what she created for them. It will always bring joy to her heart. For a while now she’s wanted to teach people how to crochet and she held her first class Sept. 8th! It went very well and as her participants grow in their skills as a class, she hopes they also grow as people in their confidence and patience.