Meet Katelynn!
Katelynn started GladeRunDesigns in 2020 at just 16 years old! During the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way to pass the time, she began learning to crochet. Not only did she enjoy getting to create, she enjoyed getting to spend time with her family. What started as something that she did independently, became a family business. She began working alongside her grandmother, Anita, and selling her products as well. There were many days spent in her grandmother’s living room, in rocking chairs, talking while crafting. This continued for the next two years. Katelynn continued to go to high school while running a business. The two attended numerous craft shows together with the dream of growing the business to become a store front one day.
Katelynn & Anita
On September 18, 2024, everything changed and Anita passed away unexpectedly. In her passing, and amid her senior year, Katelynn lost her passion for the business. She felt that she wanted to continue to create more to honor her grandmother’s dreams. While working to advance the company, she felt that she was spending more time marketing the products and was only creating products to make more content. This is when an exciting opportunity fell into her lap, an internship with her high school’s athletics department as their Social Media Manager. In this role, she learned so much about marketing, designing, event coverage, photography, and social media. Today, she still credits this internship as a pivotal opportunity in creating who she is today.
After graduating from high school, Katelynn went on to attend Ohio Dominican University, where she was majoring in Business Administration. During her first semester, she began working at the campus bookstore as a student worker and interning as the Social Media Manager there. This position, coupled with a marketing course that she was enrolled in at the time led her to add a Marketing & Public Relations major to her course load. With this new addition came a course that presented an opportunity that changed her life forever.
Her professor presented her with an opportunity with a nonprofit, NC4K (Nellie’s Champions for Kids) as their Social Media and Marketing intern. She spent the entire summer there learning advocacy, marketing techniques, how nonprofits work, event planning and marketing, and so much more. At the end of the summer, she was presented with a part-time position as their Social Media & Marketing Specialist. This is still where she works today, advocating for the same mission and working to ensure No Kid Fights Cancer Alone.
This is the reason that GladeRunDesigns makes it part of their goal to donate 10% of all sales back to their mission of providing support to kids and teens fighting cancer and their families. Katelynn believes that if you have the opportunity to have any sort of platform, you should do good with it.
Why GladeRunDesigns?
Family is at the center of everything for Katelynn. Being from a large family, rooted in tradition, it is hard for it not to be. When thinking of a name for the business, she thought back to the farm that she was raised on and currently lives on: Glade Run Farms. It was a no-brainer for her at that moment and thus, GladeRunDesigns was born!
Four generations of family on Glade Run Farms. Pictured are (from left to right): Tom Geyer (Katelynn’s grandfather), Andrew Geyer (Katelynn’s cousin), Marietta Geyer (Tom’s mother, Katelynn’s great-grandmother), Katelynn, and Merrill Geyer (Tom’s father, Katelynn’s great-grandfather)