Chances are if you grow up in a family of boys with a father who does woodwork your brothers will follow in his footsteps. But it was Amanda Williams-Clarke who decided to take up her father’s legacy and develop a business working with her hands and wood.
Since the age of 15, Amanda realised that she had a penchant for arts and craft. After developing that love at St Leonard’s Girls school, it was something she worked on in her spare time.
Though she admits that she didn’t have an aptitude for books early in school, anything with art came easy to her.
“I was more interested in the crafts and working with my hands,” she said.
While trying to develop herself academically, Amanda still worked in the areas that interested her.
“Every evening I would go to my father’s shop and help him sell,” she recalled. “I remember I wanted a gift for a friend and my father was showing this man how to make a trinket box and I asked him to show me.”
Amanda proved to be a quick learner.
“When I went in the back of the shop, I tried my hand at it and I made a box. When my father saw the piece that I made, he was so surprised. He encouraged me from then.”
Not only did her father encourage her to make things but he also tried to get her thinking like an enterpreneur.
“Just before then I was working with wooden beads,” she said. “He was telling me this was another area you could make money.”
While Amanda continued to hone her craft, she admitted that she fell prey late in her teenage years to partying and friends and strayed from it.
“I was into partying. I had the wrong influences, spending money on the wrong crowd,” she said.
“I decided to stay home and look for an ordinary job.
I started working for $90 a week, cleaning for a lady.”
It was during that time that Amanda committed her life to God.
“I remember I was cleaning and I was saying to God I don’t see myself doing this for the rest of my life,” she said. “I said I know you, God have something good in store.”
Perhaps it was her faith, but by that evening when Amanda returned home, she received a call from a woman at her church offering her a job.
“A lady had called from church and said she wanted me to manage her boutique in town and she would pay me $300 a week and she said with overtime I’d make more than $300,” Amanda recalled.
“From working with that lady I became manager at the boutique.”
Throughout those three years Amanda also learnt the ins and outs of running a business.
“Coming on to the end of the three years, I knew I wanted to manage my own business. I was taking in my lessons. Just as I resigned, another friend from church was opening a boutique and asked me to help her. I went to work for her for three years and I learnt more about how to deal with older people and getting people to work with you.”
During that stint, Amanda had gotten married and became pregnant, but she was still getting that urge to own her own business.
“I asked God to show me the right time to leave,” she revealed. “When I was going on maternity leave I left the job.”
Over the years while she was working, Amanda had started to accumulate machinery because she knew she wanted to return to her woodwork. After meeting her husband who harboured the same love for craft as she did, they decided to invest in more machinery.
“When we had all the machinery there we started our business in 2006. From then it was my rebirth. In many ways I felt like the prodigal daughter.”
Amanda hasn’t looked back since. At age 33, she is carrying on a family legacy that was started even before she was born.
“I was one of five children but I was the only one that carried on the legacy,” Amanda said. “Now the legacy is passed on to myself and my husband – this business that started with my grandfather, Nathan Williams. My father is really very proud to know that I accomplished a lot.”