October 2024 Amber Grant Awarded to Moy Studio

We’re excited to announce the September $10,000 Amber Amber Grant recipient. Congratulations to Mónika Reyes Maldonado, owner of Moy Studio. She is the eleventh qualifier for the 2024 year-end Amber Grant ($25,000).

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Mónika for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

WomensNet: My name is Jama Hernandez with Women’s Net, and I am so excited to introduce to you our October, 2024 winners. So today we’re going to be speaking with Monika, founder of Moy Studio, and our Amber Grant winner. We’re so looking forward to knowing a little bit about your business and getting to know how you’re tackling some of the challenges that you may have. So thank you so much for being here. Monika, can you tell us a little bit about what Moy Studio is all about?

Monika: First of all, I want to express my gratitude for having me here and to get know the other grant winners. Moy Studio was founded in Puerto Rico, a small Caribbean island, that was struck by Hurricane Maria in 2018. And it’s a sustainable sewing school that teaches the art of clothing creation and it empowers people with mending skills. We offer in-person workshops, private classes, and even online courses…that it’s an area that we want to grow more. 

WomensNet: Wonderful. What a skill to have, to be able to teach sewing. So, you have been doing this for a little while. Tell us a little bit about something that you’ve learned along the way as you were starting this business, that you wish somebody would’ve told you instead of maybe experiencing it. What would you share with our viewers?

Monika: Well, yes. We have been six and a half years in business, so there’s a lot of lessons. But one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in this world of entrepreneurship and something that I truly wish someone had been completely honest with me about is to take your self-care seriously. Sometimes we think that being full of fashion, knowing what we’re doing, and being willing to give it our all, it’s enough to make our business drive. But most of the time we forget that in a digital era, with ever evolving technology and the growth of AI, we’re still human.

And if we don’t prioritize our wellbeing, none of our execution plans can become a reality. 2024 has been a year of learning to heal my menstrual cycle, making it work in my favor, while also making this decision for my business. I’ve discovered too that the more in sync you are with each phase of your cycle, the more it becomes like a superpower- something that we can have in our favor as a woman, something we can fully harness even as a boss woman. So one motto that I really would like to share with you all is that if we are not well, our business won’t be either. Prioritize your self-care, even if it’s just 10 minutes in every morning. I know this is more of my experience, but I want to share with you a book that really helped me- it’s called Period Power. It gave me the tools to help me to have more power in in the process. So I hope that it’s a really helpful tool for you too. 

WomensNet: Thank you so much for sharing that. We oftentimes don’t talk about the ebbs and flows in the monthly cycles, and especially in a business setting. But for sure that is something as women, it’s not taboo, and we should talk about it and the impact it could have. So, wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that. And so when you think about your business, how do you measure your business milestones and where you need to improve on, because that’s something that sometimes in our day to day we don’t always step back and think about.

Monika: Well, at first I really didn’t know what I was doing, like most of us in the beginning of a business. But each time I gave a workshop, I had this enlightenment that the answers are already there. You are always socializing with your customer, so those same customers, are going to be the ones that are going to tell you what they’re searching for. I know that you don’t have to listen every time to your client, but sometimes they’re giving you the things that are going to give you the next step. Like for example, every time I finish an in-person workshop, I share with them a form where they evaluate my curriculum and give me insights of the things they liked and the things that I can get better at.

So every four or three months of working, I review them so I can write them down and compare it to my execution plan. And if there’s something there where they are giving me a heads up, a thumbs up, I pay more attention to it. I have to say that sometimes we want to have business plans and really need to follow it step by step, but sometimes you have your client there and they’re telling you what’s your next step. And so the forms at the end of each workshop can help you to check those milestones if you have accomplished them or add something that you didn’t think about in your execution plan, and add it1

But to close something that I think that has been my MVP tool of things, the beginning, is an agenda. To have all the things that I want to do by week, by month, six months, one year, or whatever. I have an agenda for each year and it’s something that gives me accountability of what I have done, what I am making and where I want to go. So sometimes it can be digital, but I’m really old school. So having it physically has helped me a lot and doing the check marks. It’s a healing process for me too.

WomensNet: Excellent. So I absolutely love how you give out an assessment evaluation and then pull from that data to help structure and build the next few months and the next few months after that. Just wonderful. Wonderful. I do want to end our conversation today with asking how our viewers can find you. Will you let us know how to find Moy Studio?

Monika: That’s MOY studio, moystudiopr.com. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. So, M-O-Y studio and add pr like Puerto Rico. And there you can find us. We offer in-person workshop if you’re going to be in the island, private classes and online courses. And we have more projects coming up. So you can have the news through there.