When Clanton’s Maymay Helms discovered YouTube in 2008, the fledgling video platform was just a few years old and still finding an audience.
“No one was making a career on YouTube at the time,” says Maymay, who would watch people do instructional videos. “They were just having fun. I said to my husband, ‘I think I can teach on here.’”
She was right.
In 2011, Maymay took to the internet, making one video a week to teach viewers aspects of crafting.
“Every time I’d post a video, someone would say, ‘Where did you get that product? Where can we get that?’” she says. “It just kind of turned into the business.”
“The business” is Maymay Made It, a multi-faceted enterprise — social media, website, brick-and-mortar store on U.S. 31 in Clanton — that has made Maymay a star in the crafting world.
“We do paper crafting, anything with scrapbook papers,” she says. “We do memory-making, including folios and greeting cards and rubber stamping. We design stamps that we release every month.”
Maymay — a nickname her now 22-year-old nephew gave her when he was 2 years old — had worked as a hairdresser, in car sales and apartment leasing before Maymay Made It, but she never was far from what she really loved to do.
“I’ve been a crafter as long as I can remember,” she says. “And I always wanted to be a teacher. I love that I can teach what I love.”
Here’s how it works. Maymay and her team produce several videos and live shows a week in which she takes a scrapbook product — paper, folios, greeting cards, rubber stamps, for instance — and shows her viewers how they can use it. Those products are for sale online, through social media and at the Clanton store.
Maymay has more than 3,000 videos on her YouTube channel, which has more than 380,000 subscribers.
“Some of our most popular videos are what we call our ‘as many as’ videos,” she says. “We take a paper pack made by a scrapbook company … and we make as many cards, as many tags, as many bookmarks, as many memory albums as we can make from one paper pack. We show people how to get the most out of their scrapbook paper.”
Though her reach is international, all of this emanates from Clanton, in Maymay’s studio, which is between the 1,000-square-foot retail store and a 7,000-square-foot warehouse. In 2015, she and her husband, Vince, began working full-time on growing the company, and they now have nine full-time employees.
It’s quite the success story, considering that Maymay was 40 when she discovered YouTube and, at the time, didn’t even have a Facebook account.
“Social media has been such a blessing for me to have started so early on it,” says Maymay. “Most people weren’t even thinking about YouTube when I got lucky enough to find it.”
In addition to YouTube, Maymay Made It has a presence on Facebook and Instagram, but not TikTok … yet. “I’m not on TikTok, but only because I haven’t fallen into the flow of that,” Maymay says.
Always the teacher, Maymay also has worked with the City of Clanton and the Chilton County Chamber of Commerce to create the Merchants Association of Chilton County, a group of Clanton companies that share ideas and successes and work to boost business in Clanton overall.
“I feel called to help other businesses,” Maymay says. “I feel like that’s part of the ministry God has given me. I love to help people with their social media and their business models, especially if they’re brand new to business.
“I love the network we can create where we’re constantly talking about each other,” she adds. “One of the things I’m always saying to our business owners is whenever someone checks out at the counter, the last thing you should say to them is, ‘Where are you going next?’”
People come from all over the country and beyond to visit Maymay’s store, but she also brings them in with two in-person events each year. “About 100 people come to the Clanton Conference and Performing Arts Center twice a year,” she says. “We try very hard to bring people to Chilton County because we love it here, and we’re so proud of our area.”
Maymay says she and her team are “constantly doing new things” to build their audience.
“Especially with the social media side, algorithms and the way things are fed to people change so much,” she says. “If you get stagnant, you get left behind.”
If Maymay has anything to say about it, neither she nor other Clanton businesses will get left behind. The city has a number of YouTubers, including Sew Charming, a quilt shop; Clack Shack, a handmade crafts and woodworking shop; Cog Hill Farm; and Simply Lake & Lace, among others.
For her part, Maymay wants to keep encouraging others and building on her own success.
“God has been good to me,” she says. “He’s good to all of us. I don’t take any credit for this business. God handed it to me. I say this is the dream I didn’t know I had because God had it for me.”
Alec Harvey is executive editor of Business Alabama. He is based in the Birmingham office.
This article appears in the August 2024 issue of Business Alabama.
