Rustic Grains is a passion project with far-reaching positive influence

The 2023 Fall Mustard Seed Market is this weekend, and we’re sharing a bit of the story of the hosts of the event, Rustic Grains.

Daniel and Sarah Cox are the owners of Rustic Grains.

They are inviting the public to join them Sept. 15-17 at the Clermont County Fairgrounds for their 2023 Fall Mustard Seed Market, an event where nearly 100 makers, vintage curators, and specialty food artisans from the Greater Cincinnati Area are coming together for a fall-inspired experience for the whole family.

Ahead of the event, Sarah Cox spoke with The Sun to share a little bit about how Rustic Grains, and the Mustard Seed Market, became a reality.

Sarah Cox explained that Rustic Grains started in 2017 when she shared with her husband her wish list of household furniture and décor.

“I told my husband that I wanted all new things in this new house that we had just bought. I wanted new kitchen tables and I wanted new furniture, but we didn’t have the money to afford it so he started building everything for us; he built pretty much everything in the house that we were in at the time,” Sarah Cox explained.

When friends and family visited, they saw the furniture and suggested that the Cox family start making and selling similar pieces.

Sarah and Daniel Cox, who were both working full-time jobs at the time, took the suggestion to heart and started their business, Rustic Grains.

The business, which they promoted via social media, was popular, and a success.

“We landed so many jobs that kept us busy for like a year or year and a half,” Sarah Cox said.

The couple also started selling at area markets and shows.

“We were doing like 30-ish markets a; we got so busy with markets and custom work that in 2017 my husband quit his full-time job and was pursuing Rustic Grains full time,” Sarah Cox said, noting that she was still working full-time and driving an hour and a half to downtown Cincinnati every day to go to work.

This progressed through 2017 and 2018, with lots of business highs and occasional lows.

During that time, Sarh and Daniel Cox were also growing their family and welcomed a new baby.

On Oct. 22, 2019, Sarah Cox decided she would quit her full-time job. Two days later, the family’s house caught on fire, and the Rustic Grains inventory was lost.

“We didn’t have a big facility to store all this. We’re not a storefront we don’t have a brick and mortar; we run this out of our home,” Sarah Cox said. “We had inventory in the house and we were leading up to Christmas season, so we had so much inventory; pretty much like everything was destroyed.”

The Cox family moved in with other family members and they worked through the long process of filing an insurance claim.

Sarah Cox said, “We ended up having to demolish the house. Very few products were left, and very few of Daniel’s tools were left; everything was pretty much just like ashes in the ground, so we kind of stepped away from that thinking, what just happened?”

She added, “I thought this was the time that we were going to catapult our business and grow and all this. I had just quit my job, and we had no insurance, we had no income, we just lost our house — we had no home, we had no clothes; we ended up living with my parents for a year while we kind of just sorted out the insurance.”

The couple eventually got back on their feet and started to sell again, and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“Nobody wanted to shop in stores; they wanted more of an online experience, so we would hop online from a trailer in our backyard right next to the camper we were staying in, and literally sell products and ship products and everything out of this like enclosed trailer so that was kind of all through 2020-2021,” Sarah Cox explained.

The couple soon found that they were overcommitting themselves by selling at as many markets as there schedule allowed.

“We knew that something was going to have to change. We couldn’t continue to keep up the pace that we were keeping,” Sarah Cox said.

The couple did some soul-searching and tried to figure out what sort of future they wanted for themselves.

“We were really praying about it, and we felt the tug to start our own market and that’s what Mustard Seed Market is. We wanted a place that we could spread joy, a place that was different than a lot of the other markets that we attended, a place that we could create memories and experiences with the vendors and the customers as well,” Sarah Cox said.

In addition to hosting several Mustard Seed Markets throughout the year, Rustic Grains also has an online shop, where Sarah Cox sells homemade soaps and candles as well as a curated line of clothes and lifestyle goods.

Rustic Grains also partners with local businesses to organize in-store pop-up shops, bringing multiple vendors together under one roof, usually at a local coffee shop or boutique.

Sarah Cos gets emotional when she describes the bond she has built with vendors and customers, and it’s clear that she and Daniel have poured a lot of love into this passion project – Rustic Grains.

“It really is a humbling experience,” she said. “These vendors are trusting us and putting their faith in us.”

For more information about Rustic Grains, visit http://rusticgrains.com/.