Milwaukee-based media company Carvd N Stone is launching a new series that aims to tell the stories of the people behind tech and e-commerce giant Amazon.
That’s thanks to a new partnership deal with Amazon itself. Carvd N Stone’s “Amazon Story Series” will profile a range of individuals associated with the company, including employees, contractors and recipients of Amazon’s various grant programs. Carvd N Stone will write and publish these stories on a monthly basis on its website and social media channels.
Through positive human-interest stories — the type of storytelling Carvd N Stone has made its primary focus — the series is meant to highlight Amazon as “more than a tech company,” said Nyesha Stone, who founded Carvd N Stone in 2017.
Aside from Amazon’s obvious, and some would say controversial, stronghold on e-commerce — making it easier and faster than ever for consumers to order and receive anything from gas engines to prescription medications and making it possible for millions of independent businesses to sell their products globally — the company’s impact is far reaching. Amazon employs 1.5 million people worldwide and has dolled out nearly $1 million in grants to small businesses and more than $14 million in unrestricted funding to nonprofit organizations, to date, according to the company’s website.
Stone wants to put a face, or many faces, to a brand that looms large over modern day life.
“Although Amazon is a big name, that’s really what we’ve been doing for the past eight years (at Carved N Stone) is showing the human beings behind the stories … and highlighting the overall impact,” said Stone.
Carvd N Stone’s partnership with Amazon came out of the 2024 National Association of Black Journalists Convention and Career Fair, held in Chicago last July. Stone is a board member of NABJ’s Milwaukee chapter and had attended the annual convention earlier in her career in hopes of landing a job with one of the major media companies there. This time around, with a stable career and an established business, Stone had more time to catch the panel discussions, engage with other journalists and hand out free merch. Amazon was among the companies that had a booth at the convention, and “that’s how the conversation started,” she said.
Stone touted the NABJ and the local chapter she’s apart of for creating opportunities for journalists like her to broaden their networks and advance their careers.
“That’s the goal of what we’re trying to do, is to create opportunities like that so somebody like me, from Milwaukee, now has a partnership with Amazon because of an organization like this,” said Stone.
