Publisher Crystal Pressley Celebrates 10th Edition of Carolina Spark
Photo Credit: Brooke Parker Photography
By Meg Hale Brunton
As the tenth edition of Carolina Spark Magazine hits the shelves, Publisher Crystal Pressley admits she sometimes doubted the magazine would get to this point. “We’ve made it happen, our team. It’s not just me, we all fight to get it done,” she says of herself and the dedicated people she works with. “Hopefully, there will be ten more after this!” She attributes the success of the magazine, as well as her own personal success, to her determination to prove everyone wrong who ever doubted her.
“I had my children early,” Pressley says, explaining how she dropped out of high school and started working two jobs after having her first child at eighteen. She enjoyed helping people in customer service roles at Kmart and Southeastern Freight Lines, before landing a sales position at IWANNA, a classified ad newspaper in WNC. “You really don’t know you’re a salesperson until you start.”
Pressley found that it was energizing, having to prove herself as a salesperson over and over in the role. “I’m one of those people that, if you doubt me, I’m gonna show you. Stuff like that pushes me to want to show that I can do it,” she says. She goes on that she even encountered adversity in getting the job. “It was a battle being a single parent and trying to get that job, but I kept telling them, ‘That’s what forces me to want to work- my kids. Just give me a chance.’” She was hired as a floater at IWANNA, filling in for salespeople that were off, as well as building up her own regular clientele.
Despite the doubts she was greeted with (both as a single mom and a woman) when she started the job as sales rep., Pressley says that she was treated with nothing but respect by her advertisers and made lots of lifelong friends. Those relationships, coupled with Pressley’s drive, helped her to not only meet her sales goals, but to exceed them. She learned a lot from the other IWANNA salespeople, and quickly became one of the top earners.
When IWANNA started the women’s magazine, Sophie, Pressley understood the need for a publication that spoke solely to women. “I saw what the potential was,” she says of Sophie, and other similar magazines. From there, she worked at both The Laurel of Asheville and WNC Woman, where she learned a lot but felt frustrated that she didn’t have more of a role in the business decisions. So, she took a break from ad sales and went to work for Candler Budget Bridal. “I had the insight in the print world, and had the insight of working with brides.”
Seeing the need for both a bridal magazine and a women’s magazine in the area, Pressley took the $1000 she had in savings and put it toward starting her own publishing company, Crystal Clear Marketing. Through this, she started North Carolina Bridal Magazine in 2019, followed by Carolina Spark Magazine in 2021. She attributes a lot of her confidence in starting the publications to the security of having regular advertisers who were committed to running with her, like Melissa Leavell at Ingles Markets. “Melissa at Ingles has always been my #1 supporter,” Pressley says. “She told me I could do whatever I wanted to do and she would support me, and she has. I think just having that support system helped me more than anything.”
In addition to the support of her advertisers, Pressley says she wouldn’t have accomplished anything without the support of her husband Joey. “Joey supports everything that I’ve done; he’s been behind me 100%,” she says. The couple met in August 2009 and married that December. They have been together for fifteen years and share four sons and seven grandchildren.
Though she says the magazines are her babies, Pressley is also President of Xtreme Drywall Systems. She inherited the business with her younger brother Austin, after their father passed away in 2022. “We both decided to continue his legacy,” she says, adding that her dad started the business over twenty years ago. Even though it makes for a pretty cramped schedule, Pressley says she enjoys getting to put on a hard hat and get her boots dirty at job sites. “It’s a lot, but I wouldn’t change it.”
With all that Pressley has accomplished professionally and the insecurities she’s had to overcome, she hopes that Carolina Spark will serve as a source of inspiration for other women to overcome their own insecurities, and embrace their true selves. “A lot of us, we look ahead and think, ‘Oh we can’t do that. That’s never going to happen for us.’ Then, somebody reads somebody’s story and it inspires them. We have so many inspiring women’s stories, and battles that [they] have fought. We struggle, but seeing other people’s battles- I feel nothing compared to them,” she says. “That’s one thing that I want to make sure that we’re doing consistently is telling these women’s stories who feel that they don’t have a story.”
