How these Nashville craftspeople are preparing for the holiday season: For some, it's a one-person show

Rachel Whisler's alarm wakes her up at 4:20 a.m. First up is a dip in the ice bath and then straight to the gym to get in a workout.

Her husband and business partner, Ben Whisler, goes along with her. Ice baths were his idea.

By 7 a.m., Rachel Whisler is in her home pottery studio, a garage on the couple's Dickson property. It's cluttered with organized chaos — handmade dinnerware drying out on massive shelves, large vases and candle vessels waiting for their turn in one of the five kilns and storage bins full of clay waiting to be transformed. She will spend about an hour printing new orders at a computer, loading the kilns with new items and taking care of random tasks.

Rachel Whisler is one of hundreds of Nashville-area small business owners gearing up production for the holiday season. For other local artisans and craftspeople, a successful season starts with long hours and teamwork that gets the job done. For her, it means extended hours at the pottery wheel and quick turnarounds for Christmas orders.

On this day, she consults with her spiral-bound notebook to identify the day's plans and deadlines. It's covered with splotches of dried clay and messy handwriting. Lines of to-do lists are violently crossed out in black ink.

"I wouldn't survive without this thing," she says. "If I'm overwhelmed, I look at the plans in here and I know I can do it."

Next it's time for a few hours on the wheel.

The pottery wheel is the beating heart of Whisler's business, RVPottery. It's where she spends most of her time, rhythmically making plate after plate. She knows each of her designs by heart and can make them exactly the same every time.

Her strong and careful hands create hundreds of pieces every week. As she works, grabbing pre-measured cubes of red clay and smacking them down against the wheel, tiny bits of clay and water stick to her jeans.

The holiday season is especially hectic, in part because RVPottery has its only sale of the year on Black Friday.

"I look at it as a way to thank people for the year," Whisler says.

She takes a break for lunch after a few hours at the wheel. Ben Whisler is painting 14-karat gold glaze on the rims of small black dessert plates set to be shipped to a restaurant in Miami. Large restaurant orders keep the Whislers extremely busy, and the e-commerce side of the business ramps up in October for the holiday season.

Rachel Whisler has learned to appreciate both the busy times and slower months.

"I used to get so upset when things were slow in January and February," she says. "But now I appreciate the break after the holidays. ... I've learned to respect the business and give myself grace."

The balancing act of small business

Small business owners in Middle Tennessee know a lot about adapting. They know about flexibility. About pivoting their businesses to match economic conditions, changing products according to demand and meeting customers out in the world as often as they can.

The holiday season, one of the busiest times of the year for retailers of every size, is no different. But many small businesses in the Nashville area are just a one-person show. Some have a small team, and others employ family members to help out when things get a little too busy.

In fact, Nashville ranks 15th in the nation for sole proprietorship (businesses owned by one person). A recent analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows solo entrepreneurs in Nashville make up 12.5% of the workforce.

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When the shopping season ramps up, production does, too. For those one-person teams, that means working around the clock and learning to draw boundaries between work and life.

'No sense in crying over it': Staying flexible in the woodworking industry

Shelton Slack usually drops his kids off at school at 8 a.m. After all, his wife, who works remote, has the more important job.

"So I have drop off and pickup duty," he jokes.

When he returns home in the morning, Slack enters his East Nashville workshop where he crafts custom projects in his backyard.

His journey as a small business owner began out of a simple need.

His daughter needed a set of bedroom furniture. Slack, who had taken carpentry classes in high school and college, decided he was up for the job.

"We didn't really have the money for that new furniture," Slack says.

So he did it himself.

That decision more than a decade ago gave Slack the confidence to start his woodworking businesses. It's now called SS Woodworking.

At first, he got a job with a woodworking company and built out his backyard studio in East Nashville. He began creating custom furniture, and business was good.

For a while.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the lumber industry. Some wood products quadrupled in price. Some prices never returned to normal. That turned Slack's business upside down.

"It became kind of scary," Slack says. But it wasn't in his nature to give up. "You just have to get going. There's no sense in crying over it."

The pandemic impacted small businesses hard. Some entrepreneurs, like Slack, shifted entire business models to survive. For others, the pandemic reinforced just how agile small businesses needed to be.

Nowadays, Slack specializes almost completely on custom doors, typically for high-end home renovations. The constraints of limited supply and skyrocketing prices ultimately helped him find his niche.

How to know when to take a break

Rachel Muller calls herself a retired soap maker. But her business is still thriving. That's thanks to her husband, Daniel Muller, who took over the operation when Rachel needed to step back.

"I got so tired ... I felt like I just couldn't do it anymore," Muller says. "I think I learned that it doesn’t do anybody any good if I push myself past being productive and positive."

Muller knew her limits, and it paid off. She still handles wholesale accounts and ducks into the studio to help out when orders heat surge before the holidays, but her primary focus is on her full-time day job.

Muller started Music City Suds in 2010. She jokes it has been an "overnight sensation 13 years in the making."

Fast-forward to 2023 and her soaps — with witty names like I Walk the Lime and Friends in Aloe Places — are in retail stores all over Tennessee and in Cracker Barrell stores nationwide. They are the unofficial soaps of country music, sold in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the Tennessee State Museum store, the Patsy Cline Museum and more.

"My little soap babies are all over the country," she says.

It took the Mullers years to build the business to this point, slowly but surely adding wholesale partnerships to the arsenal.

The biggest challenge during the holidays is guessing which soaps will sell out. Rachel Muller says no two years have ever been the same. The unpredictability keeps the pair on their toes.

All of their soaps are hand-poured, hand-cut and individually labeled by hand. When orders pile up, all they can do is roll up their sleeves.

"Being adaptable to the situation is what’s going to save you," Rachel Mullen says about challenges she's faced over the years. "I think that’s shown us that we are capable of so much more than we ever thought we could be."

Juggling glass: Teaching the art of glassblowing

Michael Allison turns the long metal pipe with steady hands. On the other end is a ball of molten glass, softening in a 2,600-degree furnace. He chats with his students about color combinations as the glass turns in the heat, light dancing through its clear surface.

Suddenly he pulls the pipe out of the furnace, dropping it almost to the ground and swinging the blown glass end like a pendulum.

"Now I'm going to drop it like its hot," he jokes. "Because it is hot."

Allison is using gravity to his advantage to stretch the glass, which is hot enough to bend and change form.

His students look on, enamored by the glass's strange texture and properties.

Allison, who has 30 years of glassblowing under his belt, teaches classes, works on custom orders and creates his own artwork out of his Joelton studio.

Glass becomes soft and moldable at extremely high temperatures (between 2,500 and 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit). When Allison's furnace in his backyard studio gets going for the season, it never stops. No one wants to be in a glassblowing studio during a Nashville summer, so it's a three-season business.

That means Allison's business shuts down during the summer months. And it's a mad sprint during the holiday season. He's in the studio five to seven days per week. When he's not teaching, he's packing up orders and working on custom projects.

He keeps going, despite the crazy schedule, because it feels like home.

"I love teaching," he says. "I really do."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How these Nashville artisans are gearing up for holiday shopping season