Why Tucson?

Tucson, Arizona is a big city with a small city feel. It is not out of the ordinary to have mutual connections with others throughout the town. The city has been named an UNESCO Food Heritage site and the art scene has been booming in the past 10 years. But Tucson has been making a name for itself in an unexpected area, women-owned businesses.

Inside Tucson Business reported in 2019 that Tucson’s percentage of women-owned businesses is higher than the national average at 38.6%. This is Tucson, a local website highlighting things to do in Tucson, had to release a whole new article of women-owned businesses this year because so many new businesses had started up after their first one had been published in 2018.

So who are these women and why are they choosing Tucson?

Amanda Cheromiah is a graduate student at the University of Arizona, who stumbled into her business. Cheromiah began taking photos on her iPhone that began to get noticed by friends and family.

“I would get referred to by just, you know, word of mouth and they’re like, Oh yeah, dude, can we see your photos? And eventually I was like, Oh gosh, I need to create like an online platform of some sort, just to send people to like, okay, this is some of the stuff I’ve done,” says Cheromiah.

Now, photography has allowed Cheromiah to create a side hustle while she finishes school in Tucson, and has inspired her entrepreneurial spirit.

“I envisioned after I finished school at some point creating my own business, some kind of consulting business, because I feel like the job that I envisioned myself having doesn’t exist yet. And I’m just thinking like, well, why not create the job that I envisioned?”

Akiko Senda, owner of Bloom Maven, a boutique plant and floral shop located in Mercado San Agustin, grew up in Arizona and tried her hand at living in Los Angeles for a while, but when it came to raising her family and starting her own business, Tucson was the right location.

“Tucson just seemed a lot more sort of welcoming for the type of business that I wanted to do,” says Senda, “my husband and I, we have two children and we sort of got tired of that really grueling lifestyle I’m in Southern California.”

For Senda, the move has been worth it. She also cites the supportive Tucson community for contributing to the success of Bloom Maven.

“I found that the community here has been so welcoming, people are so willing to collaborate on projects, which I have found I had a really hard time with in Los Angeles, and so we sort of all lift each other up,” Senda continues, “There are so many women owned businesses and we all sort of feel a sense of kinship with each other and buy each other’s products and, you know, support each other on social media outlets.”

Kyria Sabin, owner and director of Body Works Pilates, has had a similar experience with her own network of female entrepreneurs in the city.

“The women in Tucson, in these [networking] groups have been hugely supportive of me and my business and I in turn have been hugely supportive of them. And we’ve established a network outside of these groups,” says Sabin.

Kyria, who also came to Tucson after living in Los Angeles, loved the city and saw an opening in the fitness market when she came to help a friend open their own pilates studio that then fell through. She began teaching private lessons in the apartment above hers in Ventana Canyon and before long, the business took off.

“I was working well over 40 hours a week teaching and loved every minute of it. And clients would refer other clients to me and my practice was busting at the seams. So I had a wait list that was several months long. And, um, I realized at the time that I had found my calling and that I wanted to continue with it,” Sabin says.

Sabin attributes part of her rapid growth to the fact that when she started her studio 27 years ago, there were no other pilates studios in Tucson or in Phoenix. Now, her studio at River and Campbell is the home of Fletcher Pilates and an international teaching program for those wanting to spread the work of Ron Fletcher and Joseph Pilates.

A gap in the market also drew Mary Marchetti to start her own business. Marchetti had been living in Tucson for a long time and working as a landscape contractor when she realized that no auto shop in Tucson catered to those who don’t know a lot about cars.

“I had all these trucks, so there was always a truck in the shop and it was very difficult to find a shop that I could, um, feel comfortable in or feel like I wasn’t being ripped off,” continues Marchetti, “And since I don’t know about vehicles, I was kinda at everybody’s mercy.”

So Marchetti partnered with her friend, Deirdre Margolis, to start the business, with neither of them knowing a lot about cars or auto shops. Marchetti, who has a history of starting up businesses, felt that Tucson was the right place for Breathe Easy Automotive.

“It’s still like a small town, it’s like you run into people that, you know, all the time,” Marchetti says, “I love Tucson because it’s, even if you don’t necessarily all know each other, this is home.”

That customer and community support has a huge hand in the startup community in Tucson. Janelle Briggs, co-owner of Stackhouse, a new startup that is about to break ground on their first living community that uses converted shipping containers as housing units.

“I think Tucson is a really welcoming place and there’s, there’s a growing sense of urgency to really be proactive about launching new businesses and making Tucson into a really thriving up and coming city,” says Briggs.

Briggs and her partner, Ryan Egan, have been taking full advantage of the community aspect of Tucson while getting their startup off the ground. They participate in groups like Tucson Young Professionals and competitions like Arizona FORGE, a University of Arizona backed resource for entrepreneurs.

These resources, and others, have proven vital to Briggs while starting her business in order to get advice and direction.

“Ryan and I both had to learn what a startup was. What’s a pitch deck? How do you talk to investors? Neither of us had that experience before.”

Resources for entrepreneurs in Tucson were not always readily available, even up until about 5 years ago.

“Right now, there’s a lot of opportunity for startups with a lot of funds allocated to start startup education, but back [when I started my business] there wasn’t,” says Laura Oldaker, owner and CEO of The Academy for Caregiving Excellence. “I didn’t know how to, you know, like filing taxes, where all your money needed to go and bootstrapping and all that. So I had to learn as I went.”

Now, Oldaker does her best to support other entrepreneurs through networking and mentoring opportunities, like serving on the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. 

Oldaker, a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur”, has started three different businesses in Tucson: flipping houses with her husband in the mid-2000s, By Your Side Senior Care, which she successfully sold in 2018, and the Academy for Caregiving Excellence, a training school for those going into caregiving. For her, the mentorship that she has received from other women in the community has allowed her to grow and develop as a business owner.

“I open doors, create opportunities because I know that as it was done to me, I am doing to others and then those are going to do for others,” Oldaker says.

Hopefully, this strong community of women and resources in Tucson will continue. Doing so will ensure that more women can grow successful businesses and lift the entire Tucson community and economy up, and create better lives for everyone involved.