When Beth Seigel of Mount Auburn Associates insisted that my family’s 50-year old retail home furnishings company, Country Curtains, was a creative economy business, I was practically speechless. Beth was interviewing me in the course of researching The Berkshire Creative Economy Report, a landmark effort launched three years ago and led by Laurie Norton Moffatt of The Norman Rockwell Museum and Ellen Spear of Hancock Shaker Village.
Years earlier, I served on Mitt Romney’s Regional Competitiveness Council and became aware that Country Curtains didn’t fit into any of the conventional industry clusters in the Berkshires. Our successful company fell through the cracks when it came to categories, even though we employed hundreds of people, and manufactured locally. Still, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea of this creative economic cluster. I knew that creativity of the highest order has been a vital part of our economic well being since the days of Hawthorne and Melville. I also knew from personal experience at The Red Lion Inn and Porches, that aesthetics, creativity and design decisions spell success or failure for my businesses.
A few months after Mount Auburn completed the Report, I was asked to chair the Berkshire Creative Economy Council, aka Berkshire Creative. I landed at the epicenter of a dynamic yet subtle economic development initiative for our region, and began to fully understand what a vital creative economy can achieve.
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