Samantha Emerson grew up on the beaches of Jacksonville, swimming or dropping a line into the Atlantic. “I have always had a natural love of ocean life,” she says. She’s spent a lot of her adult life on the water, but it wasn’t until recently that she figured out how to make that passion into a profession.

Emerson, who goes by Mokie, started Mokie Burns about five years ago. She creates wood-burned artwork: detailed depictions of snook, tarpon and other Florida sea life that she sells as art pieces or items with practical uses, such as wood-burned bottle openers. She also transposes her images onto T-shirts, hats and other apparel and accessories.

Her first career was in fashion design, eventually landing in Fort Myers with the Chico’s corporation. She said she got a good sense of how the fashion industry works, but the job itself wasn’t fulfilling. “It wasn’t giving me the creative outlet that I thought it would,” she says.

As a hobby, she picked up on wood working, which led her to an artform called pyrography: Think of it like painting, but using a soldering iron as a brush and wood as a canvas. She kept getting good feedback on her work, and in April 2018, she left the corporate world and ventured out on her own.

Emerson started selling at boat shows and crafter events, and built good enough word of mouth that orders started rolling in. She recently opened a studio near Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers featuring what she calls a “hat bar” at which visitors pick a hat style and custom patch design for a totally unique product. She feels the future of her business—and retail in general—will be things like the hat bar: a way to interact with customers in a more personal way rather than just trying to get them to buy something off the rack.

“I’m trying to create a new type of experience,” Emerson says. “If [the studio] is going to work, it has to be something unique, something personal.”