Pernilla Frazier, left, and Line Daems sell their handmade goods in December at Marche de Noel, a holiday bazaar on John Street in Providence. The two women, who met through their children’s school, have become partners in Kreatelier, a consumer goods and interior-design firm. The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PROVIDENCE — On a Wednesday night in mid-November, Line Daems and Pernilla Frazier arrive in separate cars outside the Center for Women & Enterprise overlooking Route 195 in the city’s Fox Point section.

Partners in Kreatelier, a consumer goods and interior-design firm, the two women have been taking business-planning classes at the center since September.

They make their way up to the center’s second-floor office and head into a classroom where a business consultant and class coordinator gets ready to introduce the evening’s speaker, an Attleboro Web designer who’ll give a PowerPoint presentation on developing Internet sites for businesses.

Work tables in the room are arranged in a “U,” and the consultant, Paula M. Nordhoff, and the presenter, Tatiana Vybornova, sit at the base. At the top sit a Web camera, a wide-screen TV and a wall-screen that will allow participants in Boston and Worcester to follow the presentation.

The participants are all women. Dress for the presentation is casual, although some look as if they’ve arrived for the 6 p.m. start directly from their day jobs. They range in age from the early 20s to the early 60s.

Daems, from Providence, and Frazier, from Cranston, take seats next to each other on the right.

After some introductory remarks, Vybornova starts in on the basics of Web-site design. She offers a five-step formula for developing one.

“You definitely want to shoot for the industry standards,” Vybornova says in Russian-accented English.

The women listen to the lecture for an hour before a question-and-answer period starts.

Someone asks a question about copyright issues tied to using a fabric swatch as Web-site wallpaper.

“That’s a difficult question,” responds Vybornova. She asks if anyone in the classes already has done that. Daems and Frazier raise their hands.

Their classmates giggle. An embarrassed smile crosses Frazier’s face.

The Web-design session ends near 7:30 p.m. and the women take a break.

The pair sell these imported fabric baskets along with products that they make here. The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Daems munches on a Granny Smith apple. She’s been going nonstop since early morning, when it was time to get her children, Anouk and Niels, off to the French-American School of Rhode Island, near her home on the East Side.

She arrived at 8 a.m. at the Pawtucket studio she rents with Frazier to work on goods they would sell at a December craft fair and on a presentation for an interior design client the partners were to meet the next morning.

Frazier arrived at the studio, in a mill along Mineral Spring Avenue, at 9 a.m. She had to leave in mid-afternoon to tend to the family dog before picking up her children at school. On Wednesdays, the women typically take their children to an afterschool program that runs until 5:30. That gives the partners enough time to make it from their homes to Fox Point in time for class at 6. Dinners can be rushed affairs.

The November session resumes and the women dive into an assignment that takes the rest of the session to complete. At 9 p.m., Nordhoff ends the class. The women head out into a chilly night and back to their homes, where they’ll continue sewing items for the upcoming craft fair.

“That’s what we’ve been doing every night,” Frazier said.

Pernilla Frazier is Swedish. Line (pronounced Lynn) Daems is Belgian. They both speak multiple languages, including English, and wanted their children to do the same.

They met about three years ago at the French-American School, which their children attend.

LIKE PARENTS of schoolchildren elsewhere, the women got roped into helping with a fundraiser, decorating the school.

“I’ve always sewn,” Frazier said. “I started to get requests from friends and neighbors and worked from home for years and years.

“I had a dream of taking it to the next level, but doing it alone was not doable.”

Daems, whose father ran an artists workshop, had taken interior design classes at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“We started to meet and show each other our designs.”

In December 2006, they produced some brightly colored fabric organizers for makeup, cutlery and writing or drawing implements to sell at Marche de Noel, a holiday fundraiser for the school.

The pieces sold well at the outdoor market set up next to the school’s John Street building.“We were blown away,” Frazier said. “It was a huge success.

“I think we just need that little reassurance.”

After the fundraiser, orders came from people who saw their work.

They began to run out of space in their houses to store materials and do the sewing. By April 2007, they talked of renting commercial space.

“It would be a good solution to have a display space,” Daems said, at the time.

The conversations led to a discussion about where their partnership was headed. They held off renting a storefront, deciding instead to seek advice about running a business.

They enrolled in a 13-week business-planning workshop offered by the Center for Women & Enterprise.

The center is a nonprofit organization that helps women (and the occasional man) start and grow businesses.

“Part of our job is reducing as many barriers as possible to being successful,” said Carol Malysz, director of the center’s Providence office.

RHODE ISLAND was home to an estimated 101,800 small businesses in 2006, defined as a company with fewer than 500 employees, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. That includes 3,700 that were added that year, according to the SBA.

Small businesses create 60 percent to 80 percent of the net new jobs in this country, according to federal statistics. In 2004, large businesses with 500 or more employees actually lost more jobs than they created, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, seeing a net drop of 181,122 jobs.

But the success of small businesses is not guaranteed.

Nationwide, the SBA estimates that nearly 650,000 new businesses began operating in 2006, while nearly as many, about 565,000, closed that year. An additional 19,695 declared bankruptcy.

One-third of new establishments that have employees close within two years, according to a study cited by the SBA. More than half survive less than four years.

In Rhode Island, 4,600 businesses terminated in 2006, up from 4,200 the year before. Another 48 declared bankruptcy in 2006.

In estimates by the Census Bureau, the state lost about 3,800 people between July 2006 and July 2007, after accounting for births, deaths and people moving in and out of the state. The drop represents 0.4 percent of the state’s 1,057,832 population.

Leonard Lardaro, an economist at the University of Rhode Island, says the state’s population decline was not surprising. Housing costs remain high. Job growth has slowed. Manufacturing lost about 1,800 jobs statewide last year. Unemployment in the state rose to 5.2 percent in November 2007, up from 4.9 percent in October 2007.

Daems and Frazier said they applied for the fall workshop at the Center for Women & Enterprise to help their business survive the expected difficulties.

THE WORKSHOP offers a step-by-step approach to setting up a business, from focusing product and service offerings to identifying customers and advertising, as well as directing participants on how to handle business incorporations and licenses.

“For [participants] to be successful in this class, they have to have a pretty solid concept of what they want to do,” said Nordhoff, a business consultant who has run the workshop for thee years. “It’s not for people who are dabbling with the idea” of owning a business.

The classes run for three hours each on successive Wednesdays.

After the class started, the partners have hired an accountant, a bookkeeper and a lawyer. They took out business insurance and rented a high-ceiling corner studio in the mill. It was cheaper than a storefront.

In October, they incorporated their business, Kreatelier LLC. The name comes from a mash-up of the Flemish pronunciation of “creative,” with a hard “C” sound and “atelier” — a workshop.

Their Web site, www.kreatelier.com , went live last month.

They each have invested $6,000 in cash and material to start the business. Frazier said they didn’t want to take out any financing just yet.

The partners said the workshop helped them develop a business plan.

“It helped us work efficiently and decide what we wanted to do,” Daems said. “It makes it easier in the end to run this business because it’s all in place.”

The plan for Kreatelier runs to more than 20 pages and describes their target customers — educated professional women with children, who like European designs. It describes market trends that could work in their favor, such as renewed interest in handcrafted products and resource reuse. The plan lays out a three-pronged revenue strategy of retail sales, interior design and workshops.

The plan also forces Frazier and Daems to confront their weaknesses, faults common to many small businesses: little business experience and starting capital, labor-intensive production and poor access to wholesale supplies.

“WE’RE AT a point where we realize we can’t do all the work ourselves,” Frazier said.

They’ve hired subcontractors to sew orders.

“Suddenly, we’re sitting here and we’re running a business, Daems said. “Once, all of these things were very far away.”

Dec. 1, a Saturday, dawned frigid and blustery. The wind blew down John Street, whipping brown leaves west toward Benefit Street on Providence’s East Side.

“My lips are blue,” Daems said.

She and Frazier spent the morning staffing a temporary stand during Marche de Noel. “It was chaotic,” Frazier said.

By early afternoon, the wind drove them and about 50 other crafters inside the school, where they crammed banquet tables and display racks into the brick building’s narrow hallways.

Daems and Frazier found themselves on a first-floor landing, just up from an entryway where flush-faced visitors oriented themselves to the hastily rearranged fair.

It was still cold, but the partners were out of the wind and couldn’t be missed by shoppers as they headed deeper into the school.

The two greeted some customers in French. “Bonjour, Silvia,” Daems said to an acquaintance who happened in to the fair.

Frazier explained their products to unfamiliar visitors.

“We have all kinds of organizers,” she said to one curious woman.

Frazier rolled out a shopping bag made of a lime-green cloth with a floral print. She unzipped a diaper bag, a carrying case for a newborn’s necessities. She pointed out other items on the table.

She made a sale — $20.89 for the shopping bag and a small organizer.

“I’m getting tired of my own voice,” Frazier said at one point.

It was a long, busy day for the partners and their families. The two showed their fabric goods at the Providence craft fair and an artists’ show at the Pawtucket mill where they have their studio.

The studio show started the evening before, a Friday, running until 9 p.m.

“We stayed until midnight,” Daems said. “We visited some of our neighbors — it was nice.”

The partners arrived at the French-American School at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday. (Their husbands got there at 6 a.m. to set up a temporary sales booth.)

The studio show’s second day extended past 7 p.m.

Lunch was eaten a bite at a time, during the few lulls that came about during the day.

The partners shuttled between events, getting help from their husbands, who helped watch the studio in the afternoon.

The two women brought their creations — cloth headbands, carrying cases, car organizers and furniture accessories, in woven baskets and cloth bags they piled on the landing and part way up the school’s wooden staircase.

They stored a bank of cash, $10s, $20s and other bills, in a wooden box. Coins went in a gold can. By 3 p.m., they ran out of $1 bills.

Next to the cash was a half-eaten baguette wrapped in paper, the lettuce wilting.

“This is brutal,” Frazier said. “I don’t think we would do this [a craft show] if it didn’t lead to other things.”

During the weekend, they made just over $6,000.

The business-planning workshop met for the last time Dec. 19. It’s “graduation” night.

The 15 women each got a certificate noting they’ve completed the class, but not before they stood in front of their classmates and gave their “elevator” speeches — the kind of short pitches about the businesses they want to run and what they have to do next that they would give to a prospective client at a chance meeting in an elevator.

“I would dare to suggest that you all are not the same people you were 13 weeks ago,” Nordhoff, the business consultant, told them.

Daems agreed, earlier offering up a simple example.

“It makes you more professional,” she said. “I would never use the word[s] ‘vendor’ or ‘contractor,’ ” before the class.

AMONG THE women who received certificates on that final night were one who wants to start a cheerleading school, another who makes glass building tiles, a clothing designer, an organic-snack producer and a hairdresser.

Daems and Frazier were the only business team.

They’re a bit nervous as they stand together before their classmates. Their speech is studded with occasional giggles, but they’ve got the presentation down, swinging from one to the other as they describe their ideas for reusing fabric to make new products.

“We know we cannot change the world,” Frazier says. “But we can get people to use recycled materials.”

“We think writing the business plan has given us a real clear view” of how to build the business, Daems adds, among them sales promotions and hiring sewing contractors.

Frazier concludes with a whimsical remark that draws knowing laughs from the other women.

“I think we all look more than 13 weeks older,” she says. “I feel 13 years older.”

pgrimald@projo.com