Today, Audra Ladd is a champion for manufacturers big and small in Nashville. It’s a role she’s proud of, though not exactly the title she expected she’d acquire when she was a kid in rural New England.
“Manufacturing was the job you took that paid a living wage but it was sort of drudgery work,” she remembered, reflecting on her home’s economy.
Five years ago, Ladd herself became a maker. She currently has a workspace in a Nashville pottery cooperative called The Clay Lady, where she also teaches pottery classes on Fridays.
“Just a few years ago I realized how hard it was to scale a business like that,” said Ladd. “When I looked around at the other artisans, I noticed we all had a ceiling that we were hitting, and there weren’t that many resources available for us within the business support network.”
Her run-in with that deficit as a maker is what led her and a colleague to officially launch Nashville Made in December 2018, with fiscal support from the Arts and Business Council of Greater Nashville.
Nashville Made, a manufacturer support organization, runs a suite of services. Member makers and manufacturers are heavily promoted through the organization’s social media channels. They also matchmake producers with local allies in real estate, law, or financial services that could help their businesses grow, and partner with their local Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) to assess member businesses and help them plan strategically.
One of their main objectives in signing up for the Pathways to Patient Capital cohort is to learn best practices around partnering with local financial services to create new, equity-based financial products for manufacturers.
“I really understand the economic importance of having local manufacturing, both for keeping the [industrial] base present and employment-related reasons,” said Ladd. A dominant development trend in the Nashville area, according to Ladd, is the frequent redevelopment of industrial land into space for tech companies. “So Nashville Made is partly me attempting to shift the local development conversation [into] why preserving space for manufacturing companies is important.”
Though still young, the organization is broadening its support from local partners—suggesting Ladd and her team are having some success at making production businesses successful.
“Our number one job is to bring people together and support them in whatever they’re working on,” said Ladd.
This case study was co-authored by Mark Foggin and Johnny Magdaleno and originally published in 2020 as part of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance’s “Forging Fairness: How community-based lenders are centering both inclusion and manufacturing to promote equity [link to report].” This report highlights the work of practitioners in UMA’s Pathways to Patient Capital cohort, and approaches these leaders are taking to help entrepreneurs of color–including makers and manufacturers–get access to the capital and know-how they need to realize their business ideas and plans at scale.