Some of the talented potters, furniture makers, iron workers and textile weavers Suzy Ekman once met working out of their homes in the Alabama countryside probably would have done pretty well selling their hand-crafted goods at one of her stylish Makers Market stores in Lafayette, San Jose’s Santana Row, Napa and Sebastopol.
Ekman met these artisans as a young girl in the 1970s, riding around on a motorcycle with her father, a machinist with the Apollo space program who did woodworking and rebuilt cars in his spare time.
“Whenever we would go to those places, we would stop and watch and hear their stories. I was fascinated,” Ekman says, explaining how she developed an early appreciation for the beauty and integrity of American craftsmanship.
Decades later, Ekman — then living in Pleasanton — left her management consulting career to launch the first Makers Market store in 2014, a response to the difficulty craftspeople have long had in finding markets for their products…