Ok, so the opening party is over and now it's down to "bidness".
Our manager, Jessica started today. I freakin love her...stylish, dynamic, knock-dead-gorgeous, professional, and has this wicked wry wit. She is a big "product whore" like me, and comes from a background of working with exceptional merchandise. Oh yeah...I think she's gonna be a real asset to Marc and me, and she seems to be genuinely excited about being on-board at the beginning of this crazy adventure. I'm head over heals for her already.
Marc posted some pics of the store over at his blog, but I'm gonna bore you with some more.
We opened 5 weeks from demolition. Damn. This was truly "guerrilla retailing". We had set an hour of 7pm on Nov 16th and we opened right on the minute...with not a second to spare. Whew. Most of the merchandise was still in crates and boxes three days prior.

Classic retail scene. Here we see a big ol' queen checkin' out and tweakin' the window display he's working on.

Marc propping himself up and grinning after 48 hours with no sleep and a bottle of wine.

After we ran reports tonight, this turned out to be our top item so far. They are porcelain balls with typographic letters painted on them. You can fill a bowl with them and it looks cool, or you can buy your name, or the names of your family and stuff. They are just really different and cool. A customer came in Saturday afternoon and bought 52... 2 complete alphabets. (CHA CHING!)

I think that this is my favorite design element we put into the store so far. They are hand-blown glass upside down table lamps. We have them lining the vintage check-out counter.

Me, unpacking some crudites trays from Studio B. Apparently, if you call them "crudites trays" you can charge twice as much as if you called them "chip 'n dips".

But seriously, the stuff from Studio B is amazing. I really think they are the most beautiful and thoughtfully designed ceramics available today. It's all done by Brenda Holzice, a potter from Berkley. She just has this ethereal talent for marrying form and function. All her pieces are very modern, but organic. Just beautiful. I have been a huge fan of her work for years and am really proud to have some of it in the store. I did a sampling of her stuff, and am going to do a big showing of her pieces for our Mother's Day/Wedding floorset next year.
You can check her stuff out at her broker's website...
www.magenta-inc.com
Click on "Studio B" to see Brenda's work.