Working Through a Tangled Heart
The story of how I had to close my retail business
It has been an especially tough start to the New Year. Earlier this month I had to close down the retail location of the Artist’s Co-op that I ran for almost 7 years. The Co-op allowed me to give local artists and crafters an outlet for selling their work. Since we all worked together as a group, it allowed us to defray the expenses of a retail business in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to do independently. The Co-op brought together people who may have never met under normal circumstances and gave me the chance to do some good in a small way locally. It was incredibly important to me.
Any of you who happen to be crafters will know that it’s demoralizing to create things that don’t eventually find a good home. Having too much stock taking up space in your house is one of the quickest ways to discourage the creative spirit. It’s incredibly rewarding to find a good home for what you create but the path of greatest joy lies in creating something with your hands that others appreciate enough to purchase. That little validation goes a long way to inspiring more imagination and faith in our work and will sometimes motivate us to try new things that we may not have had the courage to try before. My work and the work of my team allowed many crafters to grow in skill and experience and to find an audience who may never have found them if they had been on their own. Some of our members even developed a fan-base of regular customers that they could count on to purchase certain types of their items consistently. I feel partially responsible for breaking up these connections because I had to take their retail home away from them. That’s not a pleasant feeling to sit with.
Intellectually I know that I am not the cause of current the poor economy that was the catalyst for closing our shop in the first place. What should have been our best sales season (Christmas), was mediocre at best this year. We are living in a time of great economic uncertainty and so-called luxury item purchases always suffer during a recession or downturn. The retail business itself is experiencing a seismic shift because of the rise of online retail businesses. It’s a time of shifting sands on which many are trying and failing to find their footing. Knowing all this isn’t stopping me from feeling responsible, however, for what I have taken away from the folks I care about.
I am usually pretty good at understanding and resolving how others feel based on being able to view things from a big picture perspective. This time though, I am failing at this and taking the reactions of some of the former Co-op members personally. When they heard we were closing the shop, some crafters came and got their merchandise from the store without even letting us know they were doing it and without saying goodbye. I should have expected this knowing what I know about the likely reactions of people when they are upset, sad, or disappointed. I am embarrassed to admit I misjudged who among the group would do this and I am still stinging from the mild brush-offs.
There were some crafters who I knew I wouldn’t see to say goodbye and I had resolved to be okay with that. My staff and I packed up their merchandise and had it ready for them to pick up at their convenience at a time when we would not be there. It took two of us to do this to make sure that we didn’t miss any items or accidentally give them something that didn’t belong to them. The fact that a couple of them took it upon themselves to take out their own items could mean that they took things that didn’t belong to them. (Many of our crafters worked in the same mediums, so similar items and sometimes duplicates were common.) I hate the thought of a crafter walking away with someone else’s hard work. The Co-op as an organization could write off the loss of some items, but many of the crafters we worked with don’t have that luxury. That’s the kind of thing that was ultimately out of my control but I still can’t help but feel responsible for.
The truth is that I was very proud of the work I was doing running the Co-op and the artists that we were able to help. There was a time when we even taught them new skills and gave them a place to gather regularly to build friendships and camaraderie. That was back in our heyday, but what we have done to keep the lights on recently has meant that we have been chipping away at our services and offerings for a couple of years now. By the time we announced that we were closing, no one was surprised and the good will that we had built with our members over the years had already been all but drained away. I believe this is why we went out with a whimper and not a bang.
I know that I will eventually get over how things ended but what I grapple with now is how do I define myself going forward? The Co-op was something I was always proud to brag about to others. In my small, shut-in kind of way, I was making a difference to the world around me. I had found a small circus where I knew all the monkeys and grew to love them, quirks and all. It takes time and effort to create new relationships. What if I never find a new circus or find one with elephants but not monkeys? What if the elephants are snooty and exclusive? The older I get the more daunting creating new relationships or kissing new butts seems.
I am not a terribly social or active person but I was able to keep the Co-op running smoothly for many years. I worry that I will lose touch with the people that I worked with that I really cared about. Honestly, I am a much better loner than I am a friend but having a business to work together on helped me build a bridge to better relate to others. Without the business in common, I fear slipping back into my old, solitary habits. Even if I do my best to keep in contact, friendship is a two-way street and the other person has to want to stay in touch too. Work has always been the common thread I could pull on to stay connected to others because I don’t have a family of my own that would create more interactions with other kinds of people.
So here I sit, somewhat impatiently waiting for a new window to open because a door has been shut. How do you call opportunity to yourself at a time like this? It seems terribly unlikely that lightning will strike me a second time like it did when the opportunity to manage the Co-op fell into my lap. I wasn’t looking for additional work or responsibility but among the research group I worked with, it was determined that I was the craftiest and therefore the best suited to running the project. It grew and flourished for a few years while all the while I doubted the wisdom of the expression “if you build it, they will come” even though I saw that very thing happening in real life to our Co-op.
The crux of the matter is this; I enjoyed being useful and giving people a venue for their work. I created an avenue for people to express their creativity productively which is shown to improve a person’s sense of value. Our artists were even sometimes able to independently support their crafting habits with the money they made from the sale of their goods. Being part of the Co-op meant that they could share the joy of interacting with like-minded people who could appreciate their efforts and understand what it took to create something. They were each other’s biggest fans and they inspired each other to stretch their skills and do better. Hopefully, the friendships they created will live on without our venue to bring them together. I’d like to believe that they will.
In the meantime, I will keep looking for the next opportunity to make a positive impact in the lives of others. Creating something lovely or useful with your hands provides a sense of pride and purpose that few other endeavors can match. I have the experience now to hopefully make the best of any other creative management opportunity that could come my way. I have many more years of service to give; I am not ready to quit now. Wish me luck!
