Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Harman.
Hi Amanda, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
For most of my adult life, my career looked completely different: I’ve spent the last 17 years working in the defense contracting and technology world as a systems engineer. Creativity was always part of who I was, but for a long time it lived in the margins of everything else.
Crafting wasn’t something I thought I could do because I’m not particularly good at it. In 2023, I started Unless., my handmade goods business, as a creative outlet and started selling at local craft fairs. But somewhere along the way, I realized I was much more interested in what happened around making things and making connections than I was in simply selling the things I made.
A lot of that came from my own life experiences. I’ve navigated motherhood, pregnancy loss and infertility, a rare disease diagnosis, and years of advocacy and nonprofit work. Again and again, the thing that made difficult seasons survivable was community—the people willing to sit beside you, make room for the messy parts, laugh at wildly inappropriate things with you, and show up.
I started imagining a physical space built around that idea. Those thoughts lived in an ever evolving Google Doc for years as a rainy day dream.
Not quite a craft store. Not quite an art studio. Not a place where you needed to already consider yourself “creative” to belong.
Just somewhere you could come make something and be around people.
That idea became The RBP, a creative lounge for craft, care, and community in Ellicott City. I opened the doors in May 2026, during a period when my longtime career in tech had become increasingly uncertain because of rolling furloughs and job cuts.
So I’m very much still in the middle of the story.
Today, The RBP is part open craft studio, part workshop space, part gathering place, and occasionally whatever weird idea someone convinces me we absolutely need to try. People come for classes and craft nights, but we’ve also hosted fundraisers, grief-centered gatherings, community meetups, and events designed mostly around giving adults an excuse to play and connect.
We’ve also built community care into the physical space through things like a Little Free Pantry, a Little Free Library, shared craft supplies, and everyday essentials available to anyone who needs them. I don’t see those things as separate from the business. They’re part of why it exists.
Our unofficial philosophy is, “Make things. Build community. Give a damn.”
I’ve also always believed that if you want a village, you have to be willing to be a villager. The RBP is my attempt to build a little piece of that village—a place where creativity is the excuse to walk through the door, but hopefully connection is the reason you come back.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth would definitely not be the word I would use.
One of the biggest challenges has been that I opened The RBP during an already uncertain season of my life. My career in defense contracting had become increasingly unstable because of furloughs and funding issues, which was part of what pushed me to finally stop treating this idea as a hypothetical. Then, shortly after opening the shop, I lost my full-time job (again) and spent two months trying to get back on a contract to have a paycheck while this little corner of the world gets its legs.
There’s something slightly terrifying about losing the paycheck that was helping you feel brave enough to start a business.
The RBP is also still very new. I opened in May 2026, so I’m learning in real time what people want, what they’ll actually pay for, which events fill a room and which ones absolutely do not, how to price things sustainably, and how to turn a really good idea into a business that can actually keep its doors open. Those are not always the same thing.
I’m also essentially a one-woman operation. I’m the person developing the programming, teaching most of the classes, finding instructors, ordering supplies, managing the website, doing the marketing, posting on social media, answering emails, cleaning the space, running events, and worrying about whether anyone is going to show up. There have definitely been days when I’ve thought, “Who let me do this?”
And then there is the reality that I live with a rare disease and other chronic health issues. One of the hardest lessons for me has been accepting that my body does not particularly care what is on the business calendar. I’ve had to cancel things, change hours, and occasionally admit that I simply cannot do everything I planned to do. As someone who is very accustomed to pushing through, learning to build a business that leaves room for being a human being has been its own challenge.
Financially, I’m still figuring it out too. I think there’s a tendency to tell entrepreneurship stories after they’ve worked, when all the uncertainty can be edited into a neat little narrative about taking a leap and believing in yourself. I’m not at that part of the story. I’m still in the leap.
But I’ve also learned that progress doesn’t always show up on a spreadsheet first. Sometimes it looks like someone walking into an event alone and leaving with someone’s phone number. It’s a sold-out fundraiser for a local cause, a person finding a new hobby, someone using something from our Little Free Pantry, or a customer telling me they finally finished the project that had been sitting in their closet for a year.
The challenge now is figuring out how to preserve all of that—the weirdness, accessibility, generosity, and sense of community that make The RBP what it is—while building a business sustainable enough to keep providing the space for it.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
The RBP is a creative lounge for craft, care, and community in Ellicott City. The easiest way to explain it is that we’re a place to make things, but the things you make aren’t necessarily the point.
I wanted to create the kind of space where you can walk in by yourself without feeling awkward, bring the half-finished project that’s been haunting you for six months, learn something you’ve never tried before, or just sit at a table and exist around other people for a while.
Our open studio hours are called Craft & Yap. You can bring your own project and use the space for free, or pay to dig into our craft stash. We also offer workshops taught by me and other local makers, recurring community meetups, private events, fundraisers, and an ever-changing lineup of classes that ranges from genuinely beautiful traditional crafts to things that are intentionally ridiculous. We take creativity seriously. Ourselves, significantly less so.
One thing that’s important to me is removing the idea that you have to be “good at art” to participate. The RBP isn’t about producing something Pinterest-perfect. You don’t need to identify as an artist or know what you’re doing before you walk through the door. Sometimes you leave with something gorgeous. Sometimes you leave with something deeply questionable that you adore anyway. Both count.
But the crafts are really just the tip of the community iceberg.
The RBP also has a Little Free Pantry, Little Free Library, a community-care drawer with everyday essentials, and Unfinished Business, where people can pass along craft supplies and abandoned projects to someone who might actually finish them. We host community-centered events and fundraisers for causes and organizations we care about, and I try to make the space useful to the community beyond the things I can sell.
I’m probably proudest of that part of the brand. The RBP has a sense of humor and isn’t afraid to be weird or a little irreverent, but underneath that is something I take very seriously: people deserve places where they can belong without having to earn their way in.
Our tagline is “Make things. Build community. Give a damn.” Those aren’t three separate parts of the business. They’re the whole idea.
Come make something. Stay because you found your people.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
The simplest way to support The RBP is to show up.
Take a class. Come to Craft & Yap. Bring a friend—or come by yourself. Book the space for a birthday, girls’ night, team gathering, or whatever other excuse you can invent to get people around a table together. Buy something from a local maker. Share an event with someone who would love it. For a very small business, all of those things make an enormous difference.
I’m also always looking for people to collaborate with. I love working with local artists, makers, small businesses, nonprofits, instructors, and community organizations. If you have something you love doing and think, “I wonder if I could teach people this,” I want to hear about it. If you’re an organization looking for a creative way to bring people together, let’s figure something out.
And if you have a slightly weird idea that you’re not entirely sure anyone else will say yes to, I am especially interested.
Some of my favorite things at The RBP have come from someone saying, “Okay, hear me out…”
That’s really how I hope this place continues to grow—not just based on what I can dream up myself, but through people bringing their skills, ideas, causes, hobbies, and communities into the space.
And honestly, one of the biggest ways people can support us right now costs nothing: tell people we’re here. We’re still a very new business, and there are so many people locally who would love a place like this but don’t know we exist yet. Follow us, share our posts, send an event to the friend who is always looking for something to do, or tell someone, “I found this weird little craft place I think you’d love.”
Small businesses survive because people decide they want them in their community. I’m working really hard to make The RBP worth keeping around.
Pricing:
- Bring Your Own Project – Free
- Craft Stash – $15/hr per person
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.therbp.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therbp.co
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therbpco
- Yelp: https://yelp.to/1BiNaF6d9U
