My dining room quickly became production for the making of the hats. I had piles of fabric, spools of grosgrain ribbon, and finished hats spread around the entire room. My sewing machine found its permanent home on the table and it wasn't very long before it stopped being put away every night. The cutting was the hardest for me. It just seemed so monotonous. I can remember thinking a lot "what am I doing?" My good friend who bought the first few hats took me to the next level of wholesale. She asked Jody at G'Willikers if I could show her the hats. Diana had offered me a spot for a local fair on one of their families properties so I was building up stock and had 18 hats. WOW!! G'Willikers took them all.
The word starting getting out that there was a woman in South Berwick making children hats. The local weekly did a feature article and called us South Berwick's very own "Baby Boom". I know had people stopping by my house to buy a hat. They were friends of a friend. I'm such a rule follower and knew that I needed a commercial space. I had no money other than what was created from hat sales but for some odd reason it didn't seem to be a limitation for me. Libby and I went to pick up Anna at school and we ran into Tim. I had met him at the baseball fields, our sons were on the same team. I knew that he had commercial property in town. I told him I needed a space and I didn't have any money. To my absolute shock he said he had some storefronts and we should go see them later that day.
I can remember calling Sue and saying, "Hey what do you think about owning a store?" I don't remember how she responded. When I showed her the space I think she almost fell over. It was loaded with trash "literally" heavy equipment that we would have to find a home for, more trash, and things that don't even have a name. It smelled too. It was going to be a lot of work to get it to the point that we could use it as a store. It was only cosmetic - cleaning and painting.
Barb had called us around that time after reading the article in the weekly papers. She was in love the idea and wanted to be a part of the business any way that she could. So there were the first three of us starting off on an adventure and we barely knew one another. We spent many a night and day hauling out trash and scrubbing and painting all based on the feeling that something big was taking place. Barb was all about the hats being on Oprah one day. Sue just believed. I had an overwhelming amount of energy and just kept pushing forward.
So how did we come up with the rent, the deposit? We didn't. I told Tim we would clean out the space and bring it back to life, it had been empty for three years in exchange for a deposit and rent until after we had opened. The first months rent would have to come from our sales. We opened on November 17th, 2006 down on lower Main Street. Friends and family came out of the woodwork and would just show up to help paint, clean and assemble bookcases and toys. It was one of the most amazing times in my life. Nothing is ever black and white, there is always more than one way to accomplish a task and the less obvious paths usually are the most fun. It involved a lot of hard work and one very scary near miss where if the bakers oven had fallen one inch closer I would have been in serious pain. Sue is still holding her breath till this day. Ask her about that one...Some how in that very scary moment we found a way to laugh once we knew we weren't hurt. Actually Sue thought I was dead. We did wake up the neighbors - that probably felt worse than anything, she wasn't very nice.
If there is something that is tugging at you, a feeling that you need to do something out of the realm of your ordinary life take baby steps forward and never stop thinking for a moment that it won't happen.
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