Rather than giving herself a fancy C-suite title, the unassuming owner and founder of Corporate Stitch designates her role as “Threadmaster.”

That’s because Dionne Sandiford is quick to tell you about how networking helped her grow what started as a side hustle into a company that in April unveiled its first propriety product: Cozy Covers.

“People who say they did ‘blank’ all by themselves, they’re extremely narcissistic or they are just plain lying, because you cannot possibly do even the most insignificant thing by yourself,” the entrepreneurial seamstress says, as she talks about her veritable quilt of business relationships.

Doug Lineberry, who specializes in intellectual property as a partner at Greenville’s Burr & Forman law firm, would counter that the 3-year-old startup is hardly insignificant. After all, he is working on obtaining a federal trademark for Cozy Covers.

“She’s got a good concept, and she’s just out there trying to get a business off the ground and doing it with her own chutzpah,” he says. “I love that.”

Sandiford’s invention resembles a sleeping bag but slips over foam mats like those you’d find at a daycare or emergency shelter; a pocket holds a pillow. What makes Cozy Covers different? It folds into a tote bag.

But the prototype might still be covered in dust were it not for a friend who told her to clean up her workshop-corporate headquarters in the basement of her Easley home.

“I took it off the shelf and started to do something with it last year,” she says. “I didn’t forget about it — I just didn’t think it was good enough.”

Such is the fabric of Sandiford’s personality. Even when she weaves her stories about attending conferences, joining small-business organizations and networking with powerful corporate execs, she never sounds less like a self-promoting machine.

“I really don’t like talking to people,” she says. “If I could stay here all day and just sew and embroider and have a little mini-me out in the universe, that’s what I would want.”

Still, at one conference, she happened to meet Joan Benore, vice president of Benore Logistic Systems, a nationwide transportation company.

There, Sandiford talked about her minority- and woman-owned business and demonstrated her honesty and integrity, Benore says.

“She’s there to build a relationship and make sure it’s a relationship that works both ways,” Benore says. “She is a business and she needs to make sure she makes a profit, but she doesn’t make you feel that that’s her first priority, where other companies do.”

From Corporate Stitch, Benore now orders baby blankets and beach and golf towels with the company logo and as many as 2,000 uniforms in a year, she says.

A decade ago, Sandiford moved from New York to Greenville. After giving up the corporate life, she worked part-time at Chick-fil-A while starting her business. Her bread-and-butter products still include T-shirt quilts and memory quilts, teddy bears and the like.

Her company survived the pandemic with cut-and-sew production of masks and surgical caps. Now the bulk of her output derives from embroidery and heat-printing orders from the likes of BMW Tier 1 suppliers and the South Carolina Department of Transportation.

“She was doing OK,” says Pam Grant, one of Corporate Stitch’s two employees. “And I have seen the growth in her since I’ve been here so much. She’s probably tripled at least what she was doing when I came in two years ago.”

Sandiford also defers credit to her faith and the inspiration she still gets from her late paternal grandmother. A native of Turks and Caicos and Antigua, Lola Sandiford worked as a domestic for Manhattan’s Park Avenue and Madison Avenue set while raising Dionne in Harlem after Dionne’s mother died when she was 6.

“I hope my grandmother is proud of me,” she says.

Lineberry sounds like he is. “A lot of projects fail because it’s a dream and nobody’s willing to put in the knuckle-dusting or the blood, sweat and tears necessary for it.”

And he adds, “She has the energy for it.”

In April, Sandiford officially launched Cozy Covers in downtown Greenville in conjunction with Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Furman University.

Here are just a few mileposts that led her there:

The Greenville Chamber of Commerce last May recognized Corporate Stitch as its 2021 Minority Business of the Year, noting, “Sandiford has grown the company exponentially, even during the pandemic, demonstrating entrepreneurial excellence.”

That same year, she was among two dozen entrepreneurs in the first graduating class of GVL Starts, a local and state entrepreneurship program. In October, GVL Starts selected her to pitch Cozy Covers. She was one of three participants awarded $5,000 each.

Also in October 2021, Rachel Luna, bestselling author and international speaker, invited Sandiford to tell her story at the Confidence Activated Conference in Atlanta, where she met Jamie Kern Lima, the first female CEO of L’Oréal who went on to sell her IT Cosmetics company to L’Oréal for $1.2 billion. Lima soon ordered $10,000 worth of Cozy Covers to be donated to day care centers and foster care.

In January 2019, Sandiford won a grant from the Carlo and Nika White Foundation. In May, Corporate Stitch was named  Eugenia Duke Woman-Owned Business of the Year.

She graduated from the chamber’s Minority Business Accelerator Program in December 2018.

In January 2016, she was the featured company for the 2016 BMW Supplier Diversity Matchmaker Conference.

Sources: Dionne Sandiford, Corporate Stitch and LinkedIn.

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