Sharon Schneider has the Martha Stewart gene, but with a Minnesota flare. Born and raised in St. Paul, she’s a true Minnesota girl who’s not just nice but also practical.
How Shaggy Baggy Got Started
Like many Minnesotans, Sharon likes to help out. So when her kid’s 1st-grade teacher needed bookbags, she signed on to make some. Repurposed green bean coffee sacks became bookbags and the original Shaggy Baggy was born.
Sharon was inspired and saw a bigger opportunity in those unwanted coffee bags. She contacted Caribou Coffee and got in touch with their head roaster. “He would just give me a heap of them,” Sharon recalls of how she started selling those shaggy bags.
Getting Online
As Sharon’s orders grew, she took her operation online. In 2012, Sharon launched her shop on Etsy — an online haven for homemade goods.
Things were going well, but as the platform grew, it was harder for Sharon’s products to show up in searches. So she decided to create her own site to help drum up interest in her products. With the help of a vendor, she launched ShaggyBaggy.com.
As of this year, she also implemented a shopping cart feature, so you can now buy products directly from Sharon’s site.
Odds n’ Ends Become Best Sellers
As her business became more successful, Sharon never lost sight of her reusable roots. She saves her scrap materials and finds ways to give them new life in other projects.
In fact, that’s how her best-selling product, the storage bucket, came to be.
“I had always lined the burlap green bean coffee bags with, like, a piece of heavy outdoor fabric or a heavy printed canvas of some sort. And one afternoon I just had enough canvas to make a bag but not to put the pockets in it, and not to make the handles and that’s where the bucket was born,” Sharon remembers.
“I would say 80% of my sales are the buckets. And it was just an absolute fluke of not wanting to waste fabric.”
A New Co-worker
The newest development for the business is the addition of Sharon’s husband, who retired earlier this year.
“It’s been fun that, you know, he’s available now and we’re doing a lot of that stuff together,” Sharon said of working with her husband of 33 years.
They make a good team. Sharon says he complements her well, “He’s my number cruncher. He’s my realist.”
Learn More
Find out more at ShaggyBaggy.com. Or follow on Facebook.
The Shaggy Baggy storage bucket is available in our Colorful Minnesota Box!
