Cameron’s Dreams Fulfilled With Her Indigenous-Owned Dreamcatcher Promotions Company

The fact that Michelle Cameron is in charge of the largest Indigenous-owned promotional company in Canada should not come as a surprise. After all, Cameron, the owner and CEO of Dreamcatcher Promotions, has been a curious entrepreneur since she was a tween. Her entrepreneurial spirit started when she was 12, making cookies at home and getting her mother to sell them at work. “I wanted to contribute to the family income because we grew up pretty poor,” Cameron said. “I was always looking at ways [of] helping out and having a little bit of extra money.” Cameron, a member of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, still has fond memories of her early business venture. “From a young age I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” she said. “So, I started it with me having a cookie company. I would make cookies fresh every night and put them in brown paper bags and send them with my mom to sell them out at work. Every day she’d come home and they’d be all sold out. So, I got the taste of what it was like to make a little bit of extra money.” After about a month, however, Cameron realized her cookie business was not actually a financial success. When her mother asked her to start paying for her own baking supplies, Cameron quickly realized the math was not in her favour: “I really wasn’t contributing. By the time I figured out all my costs, I was just covering the costs of the ingredients and not my time. So, it really wasn’t a great business idea.” But the short-lived ‘business’ proved inspirational for Cameron. “My mom was a single mom and I always helped with my sister,” she added. “My mom would work two jobs so I was always either cooking, cleaning and watching my little sister. Doing those things since I was 12 years old. It wasn’t much for me to start a cookie business because I was already cooking pretty much everything homecooked that you could imagine.” Cameron would go on to raise five children herself. While her children were her priority, Cameron also had ideas of how to make a few bucks rattling around in her head. “The burning desire to be an entrepreneur has always been there and always will be there I think,” she said. “So, as I got older, I always looked at different things at how can it be a business, how can I turn this into a business. So, in my 30s I had this idea that embroidery would be a good idea.” Cameron noticed an embroidered item with a logo, like a jacket or a toque, everywhere she went: “I started noticing it [embroidery] at hockey tournaments. And a lightbulb went off and I thought that’s a really great idea. Every year, there’s going to be a new team that comes and kids grow out of their stuff so every year they’re going to need a new hat, a new toque, new jackets, new pants and a new jersey. So that was my idea.” Cameron launched her company in 2011 and called it Dreamcatcher Embroidery. “I bought a used embroidery machine and watched YouTube videos for a couple of months teaching myself to embroider,” she said. “Thinking about it now, I had the basic skills for embroidery but somehow I turned that into a multi-million-dollar business with one machine.” Cameron changed the name of her company to Dreamcatcher Promotions in 2013 to reflect the business’ expansion beyond embroidered products to include other promotional items. But the early days of her business were not …