H eadlines
Philly Faces: Tribe12 Fellow
Starts Business to Make
Mosaics from Wedding Glass
L O CAL
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
DANIELLE BRIEF, 27, is a
member of the 2019 cohort
of Tribe12 Fellows, an educa-
tional leadership program that
allows the Drexel University
graduate to pursue a Jewishly
focused venture alongside her
full-time job working in the
corporate office of Five Below.

Brief spoke about her ven-
ture, HamsaMade, and what
success would look like to her.

How did HamsaMade
come to be?
It was the week of my twin
sister’s wedding, and I was hav-
ing trouble sleeping. I was also
conflicted with what to get her
and her husband as a wedding
gift. I felt that writing a check
to my own sister, after being so
involved in the wedding plan-
ning process, would be a little
bit impersonal. And everything
on her registry had already been
purchased, and I didn’t want to
just get her a set of dishes.

So I came up with this idea
of when she has all this shat-
tered glass following her chup-
pah ceremony, to then turn it
into a mosaic so she could then
cherish that moment forever.

Mosaic is a hobby that my
family has shared since I was
a really young girl. My dad’s
a mosaic artist, and it kind of
NAME: BERTA SAWYER; WIDTH: 3.625 IN;
DEPTH: 5.5 IN; COLOR: BLACK; AD NUMBER:
00083059 just trickled down to every-
one in my family. Like, literally
everything in our home is cov-
ered in tile and glass and other
three-dimensional objects.

So I thought it’d be a cool
way to incorporate a passion of
mine with solving the problem
of, I don’t wanna buy something
just off a registry, I don’t wanna
write a check and I want to get
her something that will be really
memorable and meaningful.

At about the same time, the
Tribe12 Fellowship application
went live, and I thought, ‘I always
wanted to have my own brand.’
How did that fit in with the
application process?
The Tribe12 application
Mosaic is a hobby that my family has shared since I was a really young
girl. The application process just solidified that I had an idea that I was
passionate about and wanted to pursue.”
DANIELLE BRIEF
Danielle Brief
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Photo courtesy of Danielle Brief
asked a lot of really deep ques-
tions on describing yourself,
just giving a little blurb about
who you are, what is your
venture, why do you want to
launch it now, of all times. And
I actually wrote everything out
in a notebook. I didn’t even
type it out because I just felt
like my ideas were flowing, and
I was really inspired. And I was
on a plane, so I didn’t have my
laptop with me.

So the application process
actually just solidified that I had
an idea that I was passionate
about and wanted to pursue.

Right off the bat in my
application, it was clear that
I had a strong idea, and then
there was an interview process.

It was kind of like lightning
speed dating, where you’re in a
room with 10 different tables,
JEWISH EXPONENT
each with two interviewers,
and you have five minutes per
table, roughly, to really pitch
your idea, like you have an ele-
vator pitch.

And that was intense, and
the first two rounds were really
my practice, but by the third
interviewer I knew exactly
what my goal was — I knew
how to express it. And it’s hard
when you have an idea that’s
really just in the initial concept
stage to make people under-
stand how it could be a viable
business and how it’s unique.

So that interview process
kind of confirmed that I had an
idea that’s not just in my own
head — I said it out loud to 20
people who all seemed really
excited by it, and understood
what I was trying to do. That
just confirmed even further
that I wanted to go through
this fellowship process.

What are your hopes for
HamsaMade? My hope is that I can one
day just be, you know, scrolling
through Instagram and see a
stranger that I never met post a
picture of my work, and be like,
“Oh my gosh, I just found this
awesome mosaic that showcases
my friend’s glass from their
chuppah ceremony, how cool is
this?” If I could see one person
who’s not my mom or my sister
or my coworkers that have one
of my custom pieces in their
home that they’re enjoying —
that would be really meaningful
to me. l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
MARCH 7, 2019
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