CGS Student’s Key Chains Land on Oprah’s Favorite Things
For the second year in a row, Emma Johnson’s (CGS’17) cute handmade key chains have landed a coveted spot on Oprah’s Favorite Things list. The accessories—coming in bright emoji, tassel and faux-fur designs—were dubbed a “cheap and cheery” find on this year’s list, with the added “fringe benefit” that Johnson herself is an intern at O, The Oprah Magazine.
Johnson, who manages Em John Jewelry from her Boston University dorm room, built up her business so she could graduate from college debt-free. BU Today reports that her entrepreneurial journey began in 2013, when she posted an Instagram picture of her latest craft project and was “immediately bombarded with messages from friends and others asking where they could purchase one of her bracelets.”
Johnson told CGS, “When I first started Em John Jewelry, I just thought of it as a hobby. I was going into my junior year of high school and I just thought this would be fun to sell to friends and family.” But setting a big goal—paying for college while she was still in high school—pushed her to take it to the next step: “That’s motivated me to keep going with Em John–setting a goal for myself and motivating myself to keep up with it.”
Her key chains first found a spot on Oprah’s Favorite Things in 2015—making her the youngest business owner ever featured on the list—which then led to an internship with O, The Oprah Magazine during the summer of 2016. Johnson told CGS she’d been obsessed with magazines since she was a little girl. When she got the opportunity to work as an intern in the magazine’s style section, she jumped at the chance to see how the magazine gets printed each month. “It’s definitely a hectic, pressure-filled environment where you’re expected to come in and do fifty million different things in one day,” she said. She tells BU Today the experience gave her insight into the “inner workings of the relationship between business and media”—and she even got to meet Oprah herself.
Johnson said CGS has given her the opportunity to explore different strengths. People assumed she would go to business school but Johnson knew, “I’m more of the creative type, not the type who wants to sit and crunch numbers all day.” Going to CGS has given her room to explore both sides, she says, without having to decide on a major immediately. Her rhetoric class with Lynn O’Brien Hallstein—a professor she says “pushes you to be better and better and better”—has been one of her favorite CGS classes: “She challenges us to go to the max, and even if you don’t get an A at the end of the day… by the end of the year you do see improvement.”
Read more about Emma Johnson’s business journey in BU Today and on Fox 25 Boston. You can find Em John Jewelry online at EmJohnJewelry.com.