Daily Inspiration: Meet April Villalobos

Today we’d like to introduce you to April Villalobos.

Hi April, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We are a mother and daughter business.
Mom (Cion Villalobos):
This all started of my worry about my Daughter. she used to be very shy and I want her to interact with people more. that’s the reason why I decided to start going to vendor craft fair events, for her to do more Socializing. It helps a lot for her to overcome it. I’m a single mom raising her alone. I’m mostly at work to provide for her needs and doing Craft fair on weekends is our way of spending quality time together.

Daughter:
I have a Masters Degree in Theatre Arts and my mom works as a Graphic Designer at a natural stone company called MS International. We started our small business during the pandemic making hand-sewn masks; selling it on Etsy and it transitioned to selling scarves and handmade beanies. Year after that, we decided to try selling crochet plushies since my mom has always been good at making hand made arts and crafts.

We really enjoyed doing it as a way to spend quality time together, meeting so many more people just like us and it’s my mom’s way of teaching me how to run my own small business. From the beginning my mom spending $75 on materials and it grows from there until we opened our own website and more or less 20-25 vendor craft fairs in a year; having ber seasons be our best selling months.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like all other businesses, it has it’s ups and downs. Since mom works full time, time is always an issue having enough inventory to sell. 2 years after we opened our Etsy, we got shut down without a warning, which ended up losing a lot of customers, we didn’t have time to open up our own website to redirect them. Then we started selling our mask inventory on Mercari after a year it got shut down due to selling copyrighted fabric designs, like Disney fabric. We were so worried then that the business would be totally gone, that’s when we decided to do crochet amigurumis.

And it was the best decision we have made so far.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Mom works as a graphic artist but has a degree on Computer Science and she manages the whole graphic department in the company she worked with. She was even involved in some big memorial projects like the “Go for Broke” Memorial at LA which is a Japanese American World War Memorial is one of them. She has been working at MS International, Inc. for 28 years to present.

As for me, the daughter, I have a double assosiates degree in Sociology and Behavorial Sciences as well as Liberal Arts with a Masterials in Theatre Arts.

What’s next?
Since we opened our website, we are expanding our products to making DTF apparel (shirts, hoodies, and crewnecks) mom designs the DTF for the shirts so it can be unique. To open a TikTok shop and hoping we will be able to sell our products to big conventions like ComicCon and Anime Expo, we do get invited to attend and be a vendor to a lot, but mom can’t crochet as much as we sell. But we are working on it.

Pricing:

• $15- $75 for crochet amigurumis
• $25- $30 for DTF shirts
• $45- $50 on crewnecks
• $50- $60 on hoodies
• $25- $45 for beanies and scarves

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.CionsUnlimited.store
• Instagram: @Cions.Unlimited
• Facebook: @Cions.Unlimited
• Youtube: @Cions.Unlimited
• Other: TikTok; – @Cions.Unlimited

Image Credits
All Photos Takes by Mom “Cion Urbano Villalobos”