Rising Stars: Meet Felisha Norman & Nicci Bates

Today we’d like to introduce you to Felisha Norman & Nicci Bates.

Hi Felisha & Nicci, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Felisha and I have been best friends for over 20 years. We make films together, we are raising our families together, and we venture into various passions together. I am an avid collector of Black Santa Claus. We realized there just wasn’t quite the representation out there that we would have liked to have seen, so we created a line ourselves. It’s been in the interesting journey learning how to navigate the e-commerce platform, and we are confident at some point, we will crack the code. Our Black Santa collection is one of our pride and joys that we look forward to sharing with the world.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The road has certainly not been smooth at all. We belong to a Facebook group called Black Santa Collectors which has the better part of 27,000 members. That group inspired us to go ahead and dive into this business thinking we would have their full support after watching them run to big corporations and throw their money at them. We even saw a few posts about the desire to support Black Owned Business, but when we launched…crickets.

Learning platforms such as Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify has also been a very rough road. There is so much information out there it’s difficult to sift through it all to get to the place you need to get to. These platforms are also not built to be friendly to the small business seller. We have gone back and forth with all of them trying to squeeze in and create space for ourselves.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Felisha and I first love is theatre. We met as theatre students at Northern Illinois University and when we discovered each other’s last names in 1996, I knew it was meant to be. We formed Norman Bates Co. around 2003 and we have put on award-winning plays that Felisha wrote. We have evolved into a production company and we have produced our own web series and 2 short films. We will continue doing short films until we have enough budget to do a series or a feature-producing works that we’ve written together.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
The role of “mom” is the one we are most proud of. Being a mom has inspired a lot of our writing, and our main characters have mostly been moms. Whether this is good luck or bad luck depends on the day.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.felinic.com
• Instagram: @felinic4us
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Felinic6

Image Credits
About us Photo credit: Satu Vourenmaa