A little update!

After a little light reading (a 70ish-page lease agreement and attachments) and some back and forth it looks as if we'll be signing our lease agreement early next week! We'll officially take possession of the property on July 1st but we have to do a bit of work to get it ready to be a functioning store. Most of the project is just finish work but we have to get some big stuff taken care of too, mainly a lighted exterior sign, and some of that requires fabricators and architects and other professionals and has to go through a permitting process. The short of it is that we'd like to be in and selling by mid-July but we might not be able to get approved for opening the doors until more like early-August. We're keeping our fingers crossed though!

In the meantime, we're still ordering stock and working on setting up our inventory database and Web store. Our point-of-sale system and online store provider, Shopify, has been a breeze to work with so far. We received our terminal equipment mid-week and got it up and running quickly and have begun entering the Rowan shipment we received on Thursday.

 

Progress on the online store has been smooth. We found a third-party template, Alchemy from Clean Themes, that has all of the features we need and works well across all devices (it even has support for Retina displays) and have started creating the artwork to make it our own. You can see a little preview below but we'll be doing a lot more to it before the store is ready to go live. 

Late last week we also placed an order you might be interested to hear about: some awesome cashmere and silk-cashmere blend yarns from Jade Sapphire! Now, be warned, Jade Sapphire is not cheap stuff...but it sure is luxe. You have to feel it to believe it.

In Mongolian cashmere we will have Blue Pearl and Jasmine in 6-ply (see colors here), Seeing Red and True Blue in 4-ply, and Green Tea, Japanese Maple, Velvet Underground, and Thunder Storm in 2-ply. Then there's Brigadoon, where we chose Stone of Scone, Heather on the Hill, Single Malt, In the Gloaming, and Highland Mist. Finally, in silk cashmere, we picked up (colors here) Blue Pearl, Critical Moss, Gourdgeous, Jasmine, Navy, Red Dahlia, Sandstone, Silver Fox, and Tuscan Sunset.

Almost forgot! We also picked up a few scarf kits too: for him in Alpha Maroon and Five-O'Clock Shadow and for her in Spice Girl and Violets Are Blue. We ordered an extra Spice Girl kit to knit up for the shop! These will retail for $110 but the scarves are WOW and they'd make an excellent holiday or birthday gift, knitted or in kit form, for your favorite knit-worthy person...or you can just, you know, treat yourself!

We'll be placing more orders next week, including a big one with Filatura Di Crosa, and with Bryson Distributing (we received our retailer welcome packet from them just yesterday). We're working on getting set up with Ashland Bay, Unicorn Books & Crafts, and a couple of other suppliers as well. More news on our inventory as it happens!