In my past life I (Polly) was a full time crafter and part time blogger. As someone who earned a living from my creativity it was really important for me to blog because it let my customers hear my real voice, it gave me an opportunity to connect with people who were buying my products all over the world. Once we opened up our brick and mortar shop in a pretty small town the purpose of the shop blog seemed to be really different. We (Eric and I) thought that it was really important to keep the blog warm but detached, not too personal. So we have really only been using the blog for shop news. But ugh. There is a drawback to that. We are not a machine. We are not Walmart. We are not a bank. We are not Netflix. We are not Pinterest. We. Are. Real. People. And I would like to stop “speaking” in this distant “we are a shop and nothing touches us” voice. And here’s something else. I get why we are supposed to use “we” and “us”, but for reals. 90% of the communication comes from me, Polly. And I am one person. So from here on out, unless the message being relayed is really from everyone in the shop, I will just say, “I” and “me” and you can know that it’s coming from Polly. Okay? Okay.
Now. Let’s talk about what it’s really like to own a shop in downtown Forest Grove.
It’s hard. It’s really, really hard. And that’s not a complaint. I love it here. I love our customers. I love the town, I love the other shop owners. But the honest to goodness truth is that there are plenty of big box stores around, and they seem to be open 24/7, they sell stuff super cheap, and there is plenty of parking. A neighboring shop is in the process of closing up this month. The owner said that she felt she couldn’t compete with the big box stores. I get where she’s coming from. But you know what? Those big box stores with the parking for miles and the endless hours and the fluorescent lights- they cannot compete with what downtown Forest Grove has!
What do we have in downtown Forest Grove? We have charm. We have personally selected items that you can’t get anywhere else. We have shop owners and employees whose kids go to school with yours. As shop owners, we have a personal investment in our community. We take pride in the stretch of sidewalk outside our shop. We don’t just work an 8 hour shift and go home. We work all the time. We work when our doors are open, and we work when they are closed. We work at home. We manage finances, we order merchandise, we make samples, we track sales, we dress windows, we scramble to do our own marketing, we answer phone calls, we vacuum the floor, we deal with leaky pipes, we take out the trash, we clean our own bathrooms, we say hello to every single customer and hope that we are doing an amazing job and that they’ll come back, because we don’t get a magical paycheck every two weeks. We earn every penny that we make. Every single small business in Forest Grove is run by real people who are working their hardest, wearing many, many hats, and still trying to go home and spend time with their families at the end of the day. And I feel so darn incredibly lucky that I get to be a part of that.
Phew! Feels good to say all of that. Feels good to type from my own personal voice and not pretend that I’m a social media monkey for a huge company. And even though I have a super long list of things to do, I’m going to add blogging to that list because I miss sharing all of the tidbits of life behind the scenes.
Signing off!
Polly