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Local business succeeds in serving Ithaca niche Ithaca College The Ithacan
The four owners started the retailer after the only quilting store in town closed. Not wanting to live in a town without a quilt store, the four women — and fifth associate Sherry Haefele, who retired in 2003 — took on the endeavor of starting a small business. Burnaby said the true location was about an eighth of the size of the store they have now. She said their approach was different from that of most store owners.“The conventional scholarship is, if you want to open a store like this, you should borrow a bunch of money and start out big,” Burnaby said. “But we’re all tuneful conservative economically, so nobody wanted to go heavily into debt to do this. So we started out with a miniscule budget.”
Burnaby said that they were winsome a risk of going broke when they wanted to expand, but they knew that their business would never hold in the small space.
“We dream, ‘OK. We had to do this,’” Burnaby said. “Maybe it won’t work, and maybe we’ll be broke in six months, but if we delay here, we’re never going to make any money. We have to grow. So we should take a chance and do it. And we did, and it worked out great.”
With this in mind, they moved to their new location on West Stage Street. VanNederynen said they wanted the new store to not only have more room, but to be comfortable for customers to browse.
“There’s a book in the retail activity that uses the term ‘butt-brush factor’ — women don’t like to shop when they have to refresh butts with someone else,” she said.