The Main Street Business Insights podcast is back! Recorded live at our 2026 national conference in Tulsa, host Matt Wagner sits down with Brandi Hines-Lee, owner of Agitsi Stained Glass in the Route 66 Main Street District.

A third-generation stained glass artist, Brandi learned the craft by watching her mother and grandmother work. After her mother passed away, she left her job and opened the studio the two of them had planned to run together, naming it Agitsi — “my mother” in Cherokee.

Losing the person she turned to with every technical question shaped how she runs the shop: no one through her door gets stuck without someone to ask.

That instinct built the business. Custom commissions led to teaching, teaching created demand for supplies, and a wholesale account required a brick-and-mortar storefront — one she found because another artist she had met while volunteering as a mentor invited her to join the artists working in Red Fork. She signed that first lease just before COVID closed the state, then redesigned her teaching studio into a layout other studios now follow, a survival story that later brought Good Morning America to Tulsa.

Brandi and Matt also talk through the pressures on the shop: rising freight and material costs, and big-box retailers selling supplies at her wholesale price. Her answer isn’t price. It’s the relationships a supplier can’t stock — answering a student’s question whether or not they buy a class, and asking what her community needs when sales go quiet, which is how hand-beaded graduation feathers for Indian Education seniors came to cover a month’s rent.

Being Cherokee, Brandi says, is about being one with the community: understanding, resilient, and always teaching. It is why everyone through the door is treated as somebody’s daughter, mother, brother or uncle, and why her students are anything but competition.

Plus: Matt shares why the podcast went quiet for a few months, and what's coming next!

Connect:

• Learn about Agitsi Stained Glass
• Learn about the Route 66 Main Street District in Tulsa
• Learn about Main Street Oklahoma
• Learn about Made Originals
• Join MSA’s Small Biz Hub

Join us next time for more insights into the evolving landscape of Main Street business.