Coming out of COVID, I got brave. Maybe too brave.
We had come through the pandemic still breathing, and I started imagining a bigger space. I wanted room to expand into spinning and weaving equipment. I wanted a real showroom, where you could try a wheel or a loom before you ordered it. I wanted a designated classroom with equipment allowing us to virtually host teachers. I wanted space to gather. I believed we could become a destination yarn shop, because there weren't many places anywhere you could find the equipment, the supplies, and the yarn and fiber all under one roof.
I did it the right way, or so I thought. I assembled the right people to plan. My banker, my bookkeeper, my manager, my business coach, and my personal financial consultant. I brought them a carefully researched business plan. We talked through the goals, the realistic projected income, whether a shop that sells yarn could really carry the higher expenses of a move. I felt in my heart we could.
I put myself on a waitlist for a larger storefront in the shopping center. I love my shopping center's location, right in the heart of the Midlothian village. One day coming to work, I noticed that a small cafe restaurant that closed during COVID did not reopen. It was not a storefront, but rather one building that had housed offices and retail businesses and restaurants. I had passed it so many times without a second thought. It was designed to resemble the Raleigh Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. With the restaurant's closure the entire downstairs space was available. Separate rooms fit the bill of what I was looking for. I just had to imagine the possibilities. Only problem: it was a restaurant. The spaces had to be completely gutted. The kitchen torn out. The floors, rotted from years of water damage, replaced. That meant a business loan, another expense, but I could see it. It was wonderful and exciting.
And then reality set in.
What I know now that I didn't know then: COVID was a bubble.
We had done well during COVID. Well enough that I believed it would last. Looking back, I should have given it a few years to settle, to see where the business was really heading, before I bet everything on a bigger footprint. I didn't. And the obstacles started almost immediately.
The new building didn't meet county code for electrical wiring. When the contractors I hired to turn the space into a retail shop, lounge and classroom opened the ceiling, what they found was a fire waiting to happen. The expense to fix it all fell directly on me. The owners of the building refused to accept responsibility for the actions of former tenants, so I was paying for other people's shortcuts.
When it was all said and done, we had a beautiful space. I want you to know that part is true. It was everything I'd pictured.
But the business didn't grow fast enough to keep up with what the beautiful space cost.
This is the very vulnerable part of the story that most of you never knew.
For a year, the expense to operate the larger space were more than the revenue. I kept us afloat with my own 401K. We ran up credit just to keep yarn in the shop. To survive, we started bringing in commercial yarns, enough to keep the shelves stocked, but not the variety, not the exclusive lines I was known for, not the shop I had spent years building. I was getting farther and farther from my own vision of what I wanted this business to be, and I was losing a whole lot of sleep over it. I was so scared. There was a stretch of time where I did not think we were going to make it.
Then in 2023, I attended H+H market in Chicago. Part of market includes an education segment where experts in the field of creative small businesses teach classes on a variety of subjects. I went to one session with a retail coach, Gwen Bortner, on the subject of keeping your business sustainable and healthy. I'm not kidding when I tell you that I felt that being in that room was not a coincidence or an accident. My faith tells me that I was led to that session by the God who has been by my side during this entire journey, including every valley I walked through. What resulted from that session was a partnership with Gwen, whom I hired shortly after that trip.
One of the things I respect most about Gwen is that she pulls no punches. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that my business was not sustainable. After my pity party, Gwen and my whole team hit the ground running, running so fast because the bleeding had to stop. There were lots and lots of tough decisions and cuts, and hard choices, none of which I wanted to make. Choices that felt, at the time, like giving up the very thing that made us us. I felt at that point that I would never get back to a shop that featured the exclusive yarns that I was known for.
But slowly, very slowly, we started pulling ourselves back up. Sometimes you have to burn it all down so something new can grow. That's what we did. And three years later, we are still in business, bruises and all.
And here is the thing I want you to know.
This community got me through it, and continues to get me through it. That is not a figure of speech. In the middle of the worst of it, you would tell me, unprompted, what this place meant to you. What you'd found here. Who you'd become here. And every time you did, I knew I could not just close the doors and walk away. You didn't know you were doing it, but you kept me fighting.
Running a small business is one of the hardest things I have ever done, and the thing I was least prepared for. I have multiple degrees and certificates, a perfectionist's streak, and more stubbornness than is probably healthy, and none of it taught me how to run a business. I learned that the hard way.
I don't take it for granted that this could all fall apart again tomorrow. Your support for this small business, your choice to spend your dollars with us, is the only way we keep going. Would I do it differently, knowing what I know now? In a heartbeat.
Would I change opening Dances With Wool? Never. Every hard lesson led me here. And the gift, the whole gift, has been you. Thank you, especially for the times you encouraged me without ever knowing how much I needed it right then. You are the reason I didn’t give up.
P.S. My retail business coach, Gwen, was a former knitting designer in the early 2000s with her work published in Creative Knitting and Interweave Knits. She is also the author of Entrée to Entrelac, and she has traveled all over the country teaching at guilds, gatherings, yarn shops, and conferences. Coincidence? Nope.
Watch some of the videos we created leading up to our 2016 opening.