The Tiny Tassel Turns Ten

There was a time when Mimi Striplin lived in the Cannonborough neighborhood as a College of Charleston student and walked past small storefronts on her way to class, thinking how nice it would be to have a shop in a neighborhood like that one day.

She didn’t tell anyone. Not even her sister.

At the time, she wasn’t planning to open a store. She wasn’t even planning to be an entrepreneur.

Growing up in Spartanburg, both of her parents were entrepreneurs, and from the outside, it looked exhausting — long hours, financial stress, unpredictability. So she did the opposite of what you might expect. She went to College of Charleston, majored in corporate communications, and planned to get a stable job with a steady paycheck and health insurance.

Then she graduated and took a job managing a menswear store in Charleston.

She was making $30,000 a year and helping run a business that was doing millions in sales. About six months in, she had a realization that would change everything.

“If I can sell menswear,” she thought, “I can sell anything.”

She was 22 years old.

The Tiny Tassel didn’t start with a business plan.
It started with a pair of earrings.

Mimi had seen a pair of Oscar de la Renta tassel earrings — beautiful, beaded, and over $700. She loved them but never bought them. Later, her sister gave her a pair of tassel earrings as a gift and said something simple that stuck:

“You know you could make those, right?”

Mimi had never made jewelry before. But she went online, watched videos, asked her mom for help — her mom had a background in fashion design — and taught herself how to make tassels.

She started making earrings and opened an Etsy shop in September 2015. She also started an Instagram account.

That was the entire business.

She came up with the name while sitting on a pink couch in her apartment, trying to think of something cheerful and memorable. She liked alliteration.

The Tiny Tassel.

For the first few years, the business was just her — making jewelry, shipping orders, running Instagram, and handling everything herself.

Eventually she expanded into clothing, working with her mom, who began designing prints and patterns for the brand. She later opened her first brick-and-mortar store as part of Cannonborough Collective, a shared retail space that featured local makers and artists and helped showcase Charleston’s small business community.

Then 2020 happened.

The retail partnership ended. The pandemic hit. Brick-and-mortar retail shut down everywhere. And instead of slowing down, The Tiny Tassel exploded online — growing nearly 1,000 percent in one year.

At one point, the entire operation was running out of one bedroom in her apartment — inventory, packing orders, building a team, setting up systems — everything happening at once.

It was chaotic.
But it worked.

Opening her first store in the Cannonborough neighborhood felt like a full circle moment after living there in college and dreaming about one day having a shop in a place like that.

A few years later, she moved into her current storefront at Spring and St. Philip, where The Tiny Tassel operates today and continues to grow.

This year marks ten years of The Tiny Tassel — what she calls a “decade of joy.”

The business now includes clothing, jewelry, accessories, a design team, and even a month-long pop-up every August in Martha’s Vineyard, where customers line up specifically to support Black-owned businesses.

But if you ask her what matters most, it’s still something simple.

Shop small.

Not just her store — any small business. The coffee shop. The stationery store. The tire shop. The places owned by people who live here and build their lives here.

“It might take five minutes longer,” she says.
“But it makes a generational impact.”

Ten years ago, The Tiny Tassel was an Etsy account and a pair of handmade earrings.

Today it’s a Charleston storefront, a growing team, and a business built one tassel at a time.