Alexis Jenssen

founder, The Bowerbird Agency

I legitimately get pumped up chatting with an entrepreneur about their work, their products, their craft.

An Introduction: The Bowerbird Agency is a creative agency with a mission to champion small businesses. I support businesses as they begin, with demographic studies, branding services, logo design, social media strategies and community engagement opportunities. I also work to grow established businesses with the creation and maintenance of beautiful, enjoyable-to-use websites and e-commerce pages, branded content creation, and social media marketing support.

(Jenssen is the president of the Apex Downtown Business Association, and since 2018, she has managed the Apex Farmers Market, bringing in new vendors and strengthening the market’s relationship with the Town of Apex.)

Inspiration: My business allows me an unfiltered view of the passion, drive and heart behind every independent business owner. Their fire and passion for their work is like fuel for me.

Recent Challenge: We exclusively represent locally owned and operated, independent businesses, many of which have been significantly impacted by the pandemic. While their successes are our successes, their losses are also our losses. We are invested in the health and wealth of their businesses, and supporting those “pivots” everyone keeps talking about has been really challenging.

At first, we all believed this would be a two-week thing, … then it was maybe a few more weeks, businesses were still closed. Our clients were not making money and hurting because of it. We work so hard to help elevate and support our businesses, but we had just as many questions as everybody else and we were doing things we had never done before with an incredible urgency.

We worked around the clock and launched a member-based online learning platform for a local preschool in less than three weeks. We created the area’s only contact-free, pre-order platform for a local farmers market over a weekend. We created a tutorial to help small businesses sell gift certificates so they could continue to receive some income with closed doors.

True fact: I am a new duck enthusiast! Like so many other people, the food chain issues felt during COVID really inspired a new approach to food for our family. We got chickens and ducks and I have totally fallen in love with these ducks! They are fun, silly and beautiful and bring a huge smile to my face.