Nandy Del Castillo, part of the parents network at the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society, teaches parent classes on entrepreneurship.
Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society
Artist and dedicated Bed-Stuy mom Nandy Del Castillo and her daughters have found an unconventional community where they can learn, teach, and grow at the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society.
Before she became an entrepreneur, Del Castillo worked in tech for over 15 years. She was in the sales force and later, a creative and a public speaker for Apple, giving seminars on coding, but she wasn’t fulfilled. She wanted to spend more time with her young daughter, and she was pregnant with her second child.
Del Castillo would draw portraits to nurture her creativity, and when people saw the art she could make, she would hear the same compliment over and over — “I would pay for this.” It occurred to her to turn her drawings into something approachable that people could interact with. In 2019, after giving birth to her second daughter and quitting her job, she started selling her pictures as stickers through her Etsy store, Salem 365.
She established her brand’s identity by mostly making pieces of celebrities of color, like Beyonce in her Renaissance tour outfits or Bad Bunny. It didn’t take long before her products trended on TikTok, which she ended up using as a sales extension. After that, she published a coloring book, “Hollywood in Colors” with Amazon.
The business costs were low, she didn’t need space to store inventory, she worked out of her living room while rocking her newborn with her legs and drew with her hands. As her daughters kept growing, Del Castillo had to switch from multitasking to waiting for them to go to sleep so that she could advance on about 300 orders per night. Soon, that became too difficult.
She only needed a few hours per day to take care of business and that was around the time when her kids were old enough to enroll in…
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