How Caroline Weaver Is Supporting Small Businesses In New York City With Locavore

Season 2

Ep. 7August 04, 2026

Small businesses don't just support local economies, they create the communities we want to live in.

For entrepreneur Caroline Weaver, that belief became the foundation of an unexpected journey. After building one of the world's only pencil stores, closing that chapter of her career, and walking every neighborhood in New York City to document more than 14,000 independent businesses, she came to a simple realization: thriving local businesses create thriving communities.

In this episode of Becoming Self Made, Mike Michalowicz sits down with Caroline, founder of The Locavore Guide and The Locavore Variety Store, to explore why supporting small businesses is about far more than where we shop. It's about strengthening local economies, preserving neighborhood character, and creating communities where entrepreneurs (and the people around them) can succeed together.

Caroline shares how a fascination with everyday objects evolved into a mission to champion independent retailers, why she believes every purchase is an investment in your community, and what entrepreneurs can learn from the thousands of small business owners she has met along the way.

Small businesses don't just support local economies, they create the communities we want to live in.For entrepreneur Caroline Weaver, that belief became the foundation of an unexpected journey. After building one of the world's only pencil stores, closing that chapter of her career, and walking every neighborhood in New York City to document more than 14,000 independent businesses, she came to a simple realization: thriving local businesses create thriving communities.In this episode of Becoming Self Made, Mike Michalowicz sits down with Caroline, founder of The Locavore Guide and The Locavore Variety Store, to explore why supporting small businesses is about far more than where we shop. It's about strengthening local economies, preserving neighborhood character, and ...

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How Caroline Weaver Is Supporting Small Businesses In New York City With Locavore

Season 2

Ep. 7August 04, 2026

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Small businesses don't just support local economies, they create the communities we want to live in.

BECOMING SELF-MADE GUEST

Caroline Weaver

Founder, The Locavore

Caroline Weaver is a lifelong shop owner and advocate for independent retail. For the past four years, she's been building an online directory of independent shops in NYC called The Locavore Guide alongside her own shop, which specializes in locally manufactured products. She believes that the key to a strong community and stable economy is storefronts full of local businesses and consumers who actively participate. Caroline is the author of The Locavore Guide to Shopping NYC and the forthcoming book Shop World.

BECOMING SELF-MADE GUEST

Caroline Weaver

Founder, The Locavore

Top Takeaways

01
Your best customers are already looking for you. Before Caroline opened CW Pencil Enterprise, she filled her apartment closets with inventory and launched a Shopify website without telling anyone, convinced people would think she was crazy. What she didn't expect was that a passionate community of pencil enthusiasts would find her online before she'd done a single thing to market the business. Their enthusiasm was the proof of concept she needed to sign a $1,900-a-month lease.
Lesson: Get specific enough that the right people come looking for you. The customers who are obsessed with what you do will find you faster than any marketing campaign.
02
Growth isn't always the goal. Caroline's pencil shop went from a 200-square-foot space on the Lower East Side to a second location, a full-time fulfillment hire, a book deal, and a subscription service capped at 1,200—consistently sold out. She rode every wave because she could. After the pandemic, she looked up and realized the business she'd built bore almost no resemblance to what she'd set out to make. She closed the shop after seven years as a deliberate reset, describing it as being lucky that something so improbable had existed at all.
Lesson: Decide what success actually looks like for you. Bigger means more complexity—not necessarily more of what made it worth building in the first place.
03
Do it by hand. When Caroline needed internships she wasn't qualified for, she mailed handwritten letters to the right people. When she opened CW Pencil Enterprise, she skipped the traditional counter and installed a low desk so customers could sit across from her and have a real conversation. When she set out to build The Locavore Guide, she walked 2,000 miles across New York City on foot, no headphones, to see it properly. Every move she's made has the same signature: do it in a way that requires more care than the obvious alternative.
Lesson: In a world that defaults to convenience, care is the differentiator. Do the thing that takes more thought, more effort, and more presence than what everyone else reaches for.

Transcript

This is an AI generated transcript. Please excuse any spelling errors.

[00:00:00] Caroline Weaver: A thing that I'm always preaching in my business now is that as consumers, it's our responsibility to really consider how we're spending our money and to consider the ...

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It was never about what I was selling. It was about the act of building a world to share with other people.”

Caroline Weaver, The Locavore