Nine Years of Blue Willow (Part 2) - “Becoming Blue Willow”
When I said yes to taking over Lorene’s Hallmark nine years ago, I knew retail, or at least I thought I did. I’d spent more than 25 years with Carreen’s Prom, Pageant & Bridal. I knew markets, buying, customers, and long days. Blue Willow was going to teach me an entirely different kind of retail.
And maybe the biggest lesson has been this: You have to be willing to change.
Making It Ours
When I walked into the store nine years ago, it still very much looked and felt like a traditional Hallmark store. With any Hallmark there were cards. Lots and lots of cards. Hallmark was known for cards, so that made perfect sense. I loved to go in Hallmark back in the day and spend time reading cards, but the way people shopped for cards was already changing.
At one point, cards occupied roughly a quarter of the store. When you’re making so little on a card, that’s an awful lot of valuable retail space devoted to something that wasn’t producing what that same space potentially could. Little by little, things changed.
We cleared dated merchandise. We reduced categories that were taking up too much room. We tried new things. We added more gifts, children’s products, clothing, fashion accessories, home decor….. NEW BRANDS, NEW IDEAS!
I didn’t walk in one morning and change everything. Blue Willow evolved. It still has never really stopped evolving. Christmas is a perfect example. Christmas at Blue Willow became something people looked forward to. We would put up around 12 trees and have a big Christmas Open House. I loved it, and our customers loved it. I have always been a sucker for Christmas! It is my favorite holiday! Now even Christmas is changing.
There are traditions we’d love to keep exactly the same forever, but that’s not how retail—or life—works.
Everything can’t stay the same simply because it’s the way we’ve always done it. Sometimes you keep the heart of something you love while finding a new way to do it. I think that’s a pretty good description of what we’ve been doing at Blue Willow for nine years.
While so much has changed since those Hallmark days, there are little pieces of that old store that still make me smile when I think about them, especially when I realize how some of them connected to my own story long before Blue Willow was ever mine.
My own life was changing then too. Jay and I had only been married about a year when I got the store, and looking back now, it’s funny to realize he had already been part of that place in his own way long before I ever was.
Jay Was Already Part of the Story
There’s a funny little piece of this story I can’t leave out.
My husband, Jay McClure, came into my life about a year or so before I took over Blue Willow. One of my very best friends introduced us. Lori knows me better than I know myself! She had known him for years and knew we would hit it off. We were not the first couple she played matchmaker with that ended up married!
Funny enough, Jay had been the UPS driver delivering packages to Lorene’s Hallmark long before it ever became my store. He didn’t deliver to my prom shop, so despite all those years of making deliveries around Barbourville, I hadn’t known him. Neither one of us could possibly have known then how much that store—and all those packages—would eventually become part of our lives.
Today, Jay is my Mr. Fix-It. If something needs built, repaired, moved or figured out, he’s usually the one I call. He may complain a little sometimes but he still comes when I call.
During his UPS days, he’d usually ask before he even left home, “What do you have coming today?” There were definitely mornings when I knew what was headed our way and I thought… I’m going to be in so much trouble when he sees all these boxes this morning.
I often hear store owners joke, “My UPS driver is gonna kill me when he sees how many boxes I have coming today.” That takes on a whole different meaning when your UPS driver also happens to be your husband!
Fifteen boxes or so later on some days, he’d finally leave Blue Willow shaking his head. Even now, I still occasionally hear, “What have you ordered today?” The answer varies, but sometimes the answer is “a lot!’
Apparently, getting into a little trouble over merchandise didn’t end with me re-pricing things in Papaw’s hardware store all those years ago. Maybe trouble really is my middle name.
Maybe that’s a pretty good place to leave this part of the story - because by then, Blue Willow was mine, Jay was along for the ride whether he knew what he was getting into or not, and we were only beginning to figure out what this little store was going to become.
And the story was still just getting started.
Continued in Part Three, coming in just a few days… with more of the story behind Blue Willow.