Brandi Zapchenk

“I sold Werther's candies at family gatherings when I was five years old. I'd walk around pressing them into people's hands, smiling my biggest smile, waiting until the candy was already in their mouth — and then I'd come back around. That'll be twenty five cents please. They couldn't say no. The product was already consumed.”

I didn't know it then, but I was already an entrepreneur. I just didn't have the word for it yet.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky in a family that worked hard and worked constantly. My mom had me young. There were stretches where she worked three, four jobs at a time. My grandparents, my aunt — everyone filled in the gaps, everyone hustled, everyone showed up. We were surrounded by love and held together by sheer will.

But there was no map. No one who could say here's how you build something that moves forward. Just people doing their absolute best with what they had.

I watched all of it. I absorbed all of it.

And at twelve years old I got my first job — because that's what you did, and honestly because I was already wired that way.

At thirteen I started traveling. I worked before and after school, saved every dollar, and spent my summers going to Cambodia, India, places that cracked my world open and showed me how big and complicated and beautiful it all was.

I went back to school changed. Studied environmental biology and cross cultural sociology because I couldn't stop thinking about people — how they live, how they survive, how communities either lift each other up or don't.

Got my master's in international development. Focused on post conflict reconciliation and how businesses — for better or worse — shape the communities they exist inside of. Worked with Iraqi refugees in Knoxville, Tennessee helping them process trauma through art and run a craft cooperative so they could have income and dignity while they rebuilt their lives.

Business, I learned early, is never just business. It's people. It's always people.

In 2013 I sat down for a guided meditation. I was supposed to imagine my life ten years into the future. And what came to me — clear as anything — was a riad in Morocco. Leather. Artisans. A business I was running from across the world.

I had never been to Africa. I had never run a leather business. I had never been to Morocco.

But six months later I launched a Kickstarter, presold leather bags I'd designed with artisans I'd just met, and had a business on my hands.

No business classes. No mentors. No roadmap.

Just me, a dream, and a bunch of Post-its.

I learned free trade agreements the hard way. I learned photography on the fly. I got hit with self employment taxes I didn't know were coming. I put the bricks on the house while I was living in it — and I did it all while running on pure determination and the absolute refusal to let the idea die.

The business is still running today.

I joined the Peace Corps in 2015 to learn Moroccan Arabic. Not for a resume line. Because I wanted to actually talk to my artisans.

I served in Morocco from 2015 to 2017. Worked with artisan communities across the country. Helped women build businesses, price their work, find markets for what their hands made.

And I met Ben. He was a fellow Peace Corps volunteer. We became site mates, then best friends, then something more. We got married in 2025. Quite the love story.

We stayed in Morocco until May 2021. Left when the pandemic took away everything we loved about it and my family got sick back home.

We came back to America with four suitcases. Three of them were carpets.

We found a school bus on Facebook Marketplace. Sold everything we owned. Renovated the bus into our full time home. And we've been on the road ever since — building our businesses from wherever we happen to be parked.

We also once bought a food truck on Facebook Marketplace and turned it into a taco truck in Marrakech because I missed Mexican food.

We are not people who wait for permission.

I have owned a leather goods company, a food truck, a taco truck, a glamping business. I have been a Peace Corps volunteer, a refugee services worker, a director of communications, a social media manager, a business strategist, a content creator, a web designer, a carpet seller in rural Moroccan villages, and a five year old running an extremely effective candy subscription scheme at family reunions.

There is almost no corner of business I haven't been in.

And in every single one of them I learned something. About what works. About what burns you out. About what the books don't tell you and the courses skip right over because they assume you already know.

I learned it all the hard way so you don't have to.

That's why Building My Daydream exists. Not because I have it all figured out. But because I've been exactly where you are — capable, passionate, full of ideas, and completely without a map — and I know what it costs you to stay there.

I built this to be the big sister you needed. The one who tells you the truth, hands you the map, rolls up her sleeves, and gets in it with you.

You don't have to figure this out alone.

You never did.

That daydream won't build itself — but you don't have to build it alone. 🖤