How an emerging leader in Tampa found her life’s calling

At 28 years old, entrepreneur Tammy Charles has turned her passion for fundraising into a business.

Charles launched her company, TMC Strategies LLC, earlier this year, after corporate relations and community development stints at Metropolitan Ministries and Frameworks.

“My goal is to empower and support community leaders to grow their fund development activities,” Charles said. “Fundraising is intimidating … but I love fundraising, I love asking for money to support community initiatives. I realized I had a knack for it, and I also realized that other nonprofits and businesses needed help with that. So why not start a business?”

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Art to get ‘comfy’ with: The Boutique Pillow

Sheila Gribbin has always had a flair for design. In her native Great Britain, she spent eight years running a successful interiors shop called Dressing Rooms, which showcased her unique furniture and bold, colorful accessory lines.

After she relocated across the pond, however, she had an epiphany, and her designing desires altered accordingly: “Everyone’s got a pillow,” she realized. “More people have got pillows than have mobile phones.” Pillows – not the sort you sleep on, but the pillows that dress up a room, a sofa, a loveseat. Pillows that reflect their owner. Artistically-designed pillows.

As president of the St. Petersburg company The Boutique Pillow, Gribbin, 56, oversees an inventory of more than 600 designs – from abstracts to pastels, jazz to classical, cats to catamarans, dolphins to dogs.

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Publix promotions have a digital focus, and other Tampa Bay business news briefs

The Tampa-St. Pete metro area ranks No. 19 among the 50 largest metros in the United States on LendingTree’s new list of best places to start a restaurant.

Now that the Tampa Bay Rays have closed on the purchase of the Tampa Bay Rowdies, one of the first changes in the works impacts the Saturday Morning Market.

Bogus emails with the subject line “Password Check Required Immediately” were the most-clicked phishing emails in the third quarter of 2018, with 29 percent of workers clicking on them, a new report from KnowBe4 shows.

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