Meet Tyler Cadwell and Liz Ann Hewett, the co-owners of Everything Etched, a Scottsdale-based custom engraving business. For over a decade, they’ve specialized in creating personalized, made-to-order gifts for both individuals and businesses across Arizona and the U.S. Through creativity, resilience, and a commitment to excellence, they’ve built a business that combines artistry with innovation.

Learn more & support them at www.everythingetched.com

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1. Where is your business based?
Scottsdale, Arizona at 8341 E. Evans Rd. Ste 104
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2. What does your business do, and who do you serve?
We are a custom engraving shop that engraves… well, everything! Everything Etched provides engraving services to Arizona individuals and businesses who want to create unique custom gifts. We also sell personalized and engraved gifts online across the U.S.
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3. When did you launch your business?
October 2013

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The Entrepreneurial Journey

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4. What’s the origin story of your business?
The first gift that was ever made was for Tyler's mom. He etched a drop box made to store wine corks, and personalized the design to include their family name. Watching her beautiful reaction, and how much it meant to have something crafted just for her, inspired this legacy of made-to-order gifts that are personalized to each recipient.
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5. What are you most proud of in your entrepreneurial journey so far?
We’re definitely most proud of our resilience. All entrepreneurs face hardship when launching something, but it seems we've been dealt our fair share of bad luck over the last few years. Our shop alone has suffered multiple floods, a fire, and a ceiling collapse during our time here. At the initial moment, when you see those things happening, it feels like a monumental challenge to have to try and overcome. Can we really rebuild this (again and again)? But it's that mix of entrepreneurial passion and the excitement we see from our customers that keep us going.
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6. What has surprised you most about being an entrepreneur?
When you're first starting out, you have to be everything to the business. You become an impressive generalist because you have no specialist work for you. It’s just mastering every problem. But it actually ends up teaching you what YOU can be a specialist in. It provides you the opportunity to work in HR, Marketing, Accounting, Graphic Design, Production, Events, Customer Service – and find what it is that you excel at, so that you can then get help from others in the areas you don't. Liz Ann's background was in marketing and graphic design, but through Everything Etched, she realized she had a strong skill set for sales. Tyler's background is in the hospitality industry, but then learned through entrepreneurship that he had a strong skill set for AI and systems building. These may not be things you can learn as easily when you work for someone else.
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7. What has been the most challenging part of running your business—and what has it taught you?
We've unintentionally added a lot of complexity to our business. We have an online e-commerce side, we service walk-in customers and provide engraving on their items, and we also do larger bulk orders for local companies. And on top of that, every single order is completely custom in its own design. Managing all those moving parts and all of the customization can make a small team like ours feel very overloaded. This is why we are so focused on streamlining everything we can on the tech side, to make sure that we can live up to the personal element of our business.

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State Forty Eight Foundation & What’s Next

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8. What have you gained—or what do you hope to gain—from being part of the State Forty Eight Foundation community?
A stronger sense of community, especially here in Arizona. We've been here for 12 years, and yet somehow a majority of our business is actually on the east coast. A lot of people in our own backyard don't know that we're here and that we’d love to meet them! And we hope to BOTH learn from and educate other Arizona small businesses on how we can make this easier for all of us.
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9. How are the grant funds supporting your business?
The grant has allowed us to secure a UV laser. It contains the latest technology allowing us to engrave on materials we never could before. Now we truly feel like we are Everything Etched, because we can engrave on nearly every material in some form or another.

Also, with this new engraver and its compact size, we are now participating in on-site engraving for large-scale events. This allows us to provide a unique gift-giving opportunity for brand activations, and it also allows us to get out into our community more!
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10. Where do you hope to take your business next?
Our goal this year is to increase our local foot traffic into our store by at least 15%, which would benefit our longer-term goal of moving into a new space. But in a broader sense, our goal is to become a go-to business in Arizona for personalized gift giving.
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11. What does it mean to you to be an Arizona business owner?
Arizona is so cool. And we mean that. Where else do you get the perfect mix of western cowboy mentality, luxury living, sports & golf mecca, culinary hotpot, all in a car enthusiast’s dream? For us it has meant unlimited potential. In fact, if you visit our store right on our door it says "limitless" because that’s what Arizona feels like to us. It has provided us the ability to work with ALL these industries and we’re so incredibly grateful.

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