Looking back over year.....

I'm
a Little Teapot.. how our vision, our dream...became a reality! It has been just about a year now since my sister and my dream became a reality. It all started as some idle conversation a few years ago. Both of us admitting that we would love to run a store, be able to travel, shop, cloth our children and show our finds to people that cared.Well... if you believe in the Law of attraction at all then you know that once you put out a desire, and you allow yourself to receive it, YOU GET IT!I had just moved up to Sebastopol from southern California when our idea brought us to a building off of the Gravenstein Hwy outside of Sebastopol. There we were, singing our first lease with a landlord that believed in our dream. She was wonderful, she could see the excitement in our eyes and the drive in our desire. She took a huge chance on us and we were thrilled. Now, here we were with a space, a HUGE space and it needed to be filled. Originally, we had wanted to provide for others, what we felt we couldn't find. A place to hold birthday parties that didn't have huge dancing scary stuffed animal, where pizza wasn't the only source of nourishment, and where you could come to people that understood what you were going through as a parent. But then with all this space we needed to fill it.
Let me just say, on a side note...Kayse and I had no idea what we were doing. Neither of us had ever run a store before. We didn't know where to start. All we knew is that we needed to buy things that people would, in turn, want to buy. So, here we are, needing to fill the space and the most important thing, we needed to get money to do make this happen. Because I had just sold my house I decided that we would take a loan from my house money and figuring out how much we needed on a lunch napkin, we started down that road of shop owner. Quickly we booked flights to different trade shows. Because we had been raised by an artist (http://wwwmarilynradzat.blogspot.com/), we at least knew what a trade show was. Bags packed, a new business Amex in hand, we flew to Seattle, Las Vegas and drove to San Francisco. Running from stall to stall trying to get it all in, we pointed and purchased what we thought would be wonderful. We wanted something that was different, something that nobody else would sell, something that we would never cause us to be in competition with Target.
Now, with merchandise coming in, we had to have to place to put all this merchandise. The floor, unfortunately, would just not do. So off to the Alameda swap meet. We arrived with an empty truck and sleepy eyes. 6am, shopping begin! After a successful day and a now very full truck we brought our finds back to our store and began placing and moving and re-moving.
All this as well as figure out how to tell people we even existed...business cards, advertising...SIGNS! The wave of exhaustion swept over Kayse and I, but along we trotted. Finally, boxes started to arrive. It was like Christmas, everyday..opening what we ordered and pricing it and placing it and standing back and admiring the shear joy of the process!
Soon opening day came! We were ready, we were going to allow others to come into our store and we were going to cross our fingers that they would love what we created and want to buy something... EVERYTHING..anything???... we really needed to book parties and we really
needed to make some money. This whole buying thing sure does put a damper on the wallet.
Opening day...not one person came :( But that's okay, we didn't expect much, we were still swimming in excitement and we were very hopeful. Soon people started to come. People loved what we had created. They actually bought things. They raved, they stood in awh.. they made us smile
because they were able to appreciate what we had created. Soon parties were being booked and the time came when we need to re-order items. We were selling out! Thinking we could save money if we made our own cakes and scones we decided to put in a small commercial kitchen. What a nightmare! In the end it was a very costly mistake, but my oh my did we learn a lot from that process!
Well...time sure does fly when your having fun! Our lease was coming to an end and we had to decided first of all if we were going to continue this adventure and second if we were going to stay in this location. Being in the location that we were in, we decided that we needed foot traffic, we needed more people coming in and we needed an over all better location. We were doing well with the birthday parties but not for our boutique.

So it was decided, we would move. When we first wanted to start our store we looked in Santa Rosa, and found our dream location..RAILROAD SQUARE. There was this one store that was exactly what we wanted, but we couldn't afford the rent and knew it deserved what they were asking. Now on our trek to find our new location we found ourselves standing in front of the very store we had wanted originally. We took a chance, called the landlord and told her what we had, and what we could pay. She must had been waiting for us because she let us in! Our vision had come true!! We were the proud owners of a boutique now located Historic Railroad Sq. We were big time now baby! He he...