Shopping for a little advice
Department store owners’ grandson creates program for entrepreneurs
Jen Primack, a seamstress who recycles used T-shirts into custom clothing, pillows and other items, thought she had a deal to make quilts for a local school fundraiser.
When officials canceled because the price was too high, Ms. Primack said she “felt like I had bottomed out..” She had been relying on that project to generate revenues for her Squirrel Hill sewing and upholstery studio, Upcycled Designs.
Thenshe bumped into Kirsten Lowe Rebel at the Target store in East Liberty.
The two had met through a Mansmann Foundation “pod” where entrepreneurs gather monthly to receive peer feedback. Chatting next to racks of skirts, Ms. Primack mentioned her frustration.
Ms. Lowe Rebel, whose KloRebel Art in Lawrenceville makes wearable art, jewelry and goods, advised her to focus on positive aspects of work and suggested other options to generate sales.
Soon after, Ms. Primack repitched the quilt fundraiser at a lower price. The school went for it. She also picked up leads from people she worked with on the fundraiser. Now she’s considering hiring an additional seamstress to help fill orders.
Ms. Primack shared the story of the Target encounter with the rest of the pod group — one of 13 that Mansmann Foundation sponsors in low-income communities in and around Pittsburgh.
“It really helped to talk with Kirsten,” she told about a dozen business owners gathered at the Pittsburgh Glass Center in Garfield recently.
“That’s the power of it,” Ms. Lowe Rebel said after the meeting. “I had no idea at the time, but I seemed to get her back on track. The group is a community and they are people you’re accountable to.”
A German immigrant and entrepreneur
The Aspinwall-based foundation is named for Albert J. Mansmann and his wife, Agnes, who owned and operated Mansmann’s department store, an East Liberty landmark for nearly a century.
Their grandson, Joseph Calihan, a private investor who cofounded the Bradford Schools, launched the foundation in 2014 to support entrepreneurship. He named it for his maternal grandparents to honor their business legacy.
Mr. Mansmann was a German immigrant who at age 23 in 1888 opened the store on Penn Avenue, not far from the Target built decades later where Ms. Primack and Ms. Lowe Rebel ran into each other.
Mansmann’s sold men’s and women’s fashions, shoes and notions. It was among the destinations that people reached by foot or streetcar during East Liberty’s heydey as the third-largest retail district in the state after Downtown Pittsburgh and center city Philadelphia.
After launching its first pod in Wilkinsburg, the foundation has expanded to a total of 13 peer groups, including three more in Wilkinsburg, and one each in Braddock, Carnegie, New Kensington, Hazelwood, Penn Hills and West End.
A Homestead pod is comprised of all female entrepreneurs. Two groups based at the Glass Center focus on creative makers. The 14th pod will launch this week in Sharon, Mercer County.
Participants pay a fee of $50 a month. Other expenses for staff and materials are covered by the foundation, which reported assets of about $584,000 in its last
federal tax filing.
‘Learning by discovery’
The pods follow a curriculum that includes sales, marketing, funding, networking, production, information technology and legal issues, but “there’s no teacher-tell,” said Mr. Calihan, who describes his own business mantra as “learning by discovery.”
“Formal training is wonderful and a necessary part of the whole thing,” he said. “But it’s how you take it and apply it to your circumstances.”
Mansmann targets neighborhoods that are attempting to revitalize. “Hopefully we can make an impact … and be part of the fabric.”
“The Googles are fine but there won’t be a Google in all these communities,” he said of the California search engine giant that has a location in Larimer.
At the recent pod at the Glass Center, Kelly James, a facilitator for the foundation, asked members to define their customers and reflect on recent “aha” moments and suggested they hire freelancers to manage social media because those tasks take hours that could be better spent producing goods.
“I’m posting my stuff all the time on Instagram, but I really don’t know how to do social media for the business,” said Jared Ondovchik, a Lawrenceville blacksmith attending his first pod meeting.
His studio, Artifact Metalworks, specializes in forging high-end knives. He’d like to diversify, better develop his website and build up inventory to sell online.
“I need more organizational skills,” he told the group. “My ‘ aha’ moment was when a friend told me to make a list.”
Mr. Calihan, 79, occasionally sits in on Mansmann pods.
He recalled once offering advice about product mix to an entrepreneur. Thanking him later, the business owner said, “You changed my life,” Mr. Calihan said.
“This is the kind of stuff that catches you,” he said. “And you get a kind of psychic reward.”
A last venture
Raised in Rochester, N.Y., Mr. Calihan visited Mansmann’s during family trips. A highlight was picking out any toy he wanted.
Though he was only 13 in 1951 when the man he knew as “Papa Mansmann” died, the two had forged a strong bond. Mr. Calihan later learned from his mother that the store owner had lots of struggles but persevered, as entrepreneurs must.
“So his story is appropriate for what we’re trying to do,” he said, sitting in his office where photos of his grandfather and store memorabilia — including a Mansmann delivery truck — are prominently displayed.
Even after the 1960s urban renewal project that devastated many East Liberty merchants, Mansmann’s hung on for almost two decades before closing its doors in 1979. Mr. Calihan was a board member at the time.
He never worked at the store but landed in Pittsburgh in 1961 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and joining Mellon Bank’s management training program.
After nine years as a credit analyst and lending officer, Mr. Calihan left Mellon to help start the Bradford Schools, a for-profit group of career and technical institutions. He still chairs that company and is also a partner in Bradford Capital Partners, which has invested in firms such as Cohera Medical and Novum Pharmaceutical Research.
His affinity for peer-topeer mentoring began in the 1970s when he joined the Young Presidents Organization, where executives share ideas about running companies. The bonds he developed were so strong that Mr. Calihan decided to structure the foundation on the peer mentoring premise.
“I’ve had a lot of people help me over the years and I reached the point where I wanted to see if I could help others,” he said.
He tapped Barbara Moore as foundation president. She is a former business owner and a co-founder of PowerLink, another organization that provides counseling for entrepreneurs. Ms. Moore and other experienced entrepreneurs facilitate the pods and recruit participants from community development and neighborhood organizations.
Mr. Calihan calls the foundation his last venture.
“I think we still have a lot of work to do. I’m enthused about it and don’t want to get distracted from it.”