Ramstad: This Twin Cities bridal designer started a side hustle to cope with business ups and downs

Like many small-business owners, bridal gown designer and store owner Nena Rivas has worked through extreme swings in demand in the five years since the pandemic.

Weddings came to a sudden halt at the onset of COVID-19. Back then, one customer wound up postponing her wedding multiple times for two years.

By 2022, weddings were roaring back and Nena’s Atelier in Oakdale had its best year ever in 2023. Last year, however, demand for her bridal dresses drifted lower again.

“I don’t know why,” Rivas said. “And right now, it’s kind of slow. I guess it’s because of the economic situation.”

As she did during the early pandemic, Rivas has begun to rely on a complementary business teaching children and teenagers to sew.

First invited to help teach sewing in her local school district several years ago, Rivas is now becoming known by educators around the metro area. This spring, she will even teach adults as part of a community education program in St. Paul.

“After COVID, I realized I could extend my class to different school districts,” she said. “Now I’m teaching in more than 20.”

At a time when uncertainty about the national economy has returned, many business owners are similarly hedging their strategies.

Almost daily, new details are emerging that President Donald Trump is more determined than in his first term to use tariffs to engineer huge changes in the economy. Strikingly, Trump is making this gamble even before the country has settled from the two big swings to the business cycle that the pandemic caused.

The first swing was the downward growth shock in 2020 and fast rebound in 2021 and 2022. The second was the surge in inflation in 2022 and 2023 driven by supply imbalances from the rebound and by too much government stimulus before it started.

With Federal Reserve policymakers meeting Wednesday trying to complete a “soft landing” from the inflation surge, Trump’s desire for tariffs threatens to raise prices anew.

For small businesses like Nena’s Atelier, the impact of tariffs will be felt less from direct costs than from the knock-on effect it has on consumer behavior.

Already, her business and others in Minnesota’s wedding industry have been confronting a larger change: Minnesotans aren’t getting married at the same rate they were before the pandemic. The number of Minnesota women marrying in a year peaked in 2019 at nearly 41,000, plunged in 2020 and recovered to around 37,300 in 2023, the latest year for which data is available from Census Bureau surveys.

Rivas has long maintained some safeguard from the seasonality of weddings and demand for gowns. Her fashion interests are broad and her skills wide-ranging. In fall and winter she sells coats she has designed, and throughout the year she makes shawls.

And in addition to being hired by schools or community education programs, Rivas opens her workshop weekly to children who want to learn to sew and develop their own projects.

“They can learn to sew in one day. In two hours, they’re going to be able to know how to use the machine,” Rivas said. “It’s like a sport. You can play basketball right away, but the more you do it, the better you become.”

When I visited on a recent afternoon, I saw girls — her classes are open to all, but almost entirely filled by girls — as young as 8 picking through bins of fabric and choosing projects out of idea books. India Bush, a high school senior who started visiting Nena’s Atelier to make her own prom dress a year ago, announced to everyone she’d been accepted into a fashion college.

Sewing has been getting a lot of attention in recent weeks because of news that Joann Fabrics, one of the nation’s leading craft retailers, is closing. My colleague Jennifer Brooks wrote this past weekend that a dozen yarn shops are banding together for a promotional event next month.

Many fabric stores run classes like Rivas does and, as Brooks noted, there’s plenty of enthusiasm for the craft. At Treadle Yard Goods on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, there’s a regular “sewing social” on Friday nights where customers bring in their projects.

“Sometimes they’ll bring in things where they’re stuck or need a little guidance,” said Kathryn Hoffman, a teacher at Treadle Yard Goods. “Most of them show up because they want to be around other people sewing.”

At Nena’s Atelier, Rivas has set up about a dozen sewing machines, each with different color of thread. As the girls moved about the workshop and machines, she rarely needed to step in to help.

“They feel comfortable,” Rivas said. “They can concentrate and spend a long time on a project.”