We're Opening, OMG

Oct 1, 2019

It’s finally happening, guys! We’re finally going to open our doors and see this place in action. Am I excited? Hell yeah! Am I more nervous than I’ve ever been in my entire life? You betcha.

The big day is October 5th. Funny enough, it’ll be almost exactly one year to the day of my signing the lease for 3117-B Guess Rd. A full year since that wide-eyed girl wandered into an empty warehouse space and thought, ‘It’s perfect.’ I’d say something cute like, ‘Oh my god, it feels like yesterday!’ but that would be a lie. I’ve had too many ups and downs on this journey to pretend that this wasn’t a sheer battle of will on many days, but that makes this moment all the sweeter.

In other news, we’ve hired a staff! It was really difficult narrowing down from the people we interviewed because we had so many great people apply (like, literally every person was awesome and super qualified) but we couldn’t say yes to everyone. The people we landed on after much deliberation are great, though, and we’ve been spending much of this last couple of weeks getting them set up, trained, and just getting to know them in general while they admittedly also help me scramble to get things ready.

We had a friends and family soft opening last week and that was super helpful. We learned about a number of things that were working, but also left with a list of things to improve or change. I’m grateful we’re finding out now, but it also adds to an already pretty lengthy list of stuff we were trying to do before the grand opening. At some point, though, even if it’s not completely 100% perfect, we have to open our doors and hear what the public has to say. This is definitely the most nervous I’ve ever been about anything. This dream of mine, even after I started physically working on it, has been really kept to a small group of people I know and trust for a long time. Opening the doors and letting strangers come look at, take part in, and ultimately judge that dream is a pretty horrifying prospect, but this is LITERALLY what every business owner goes through, and there is some comfort in that.

Deep breaths, Virginia. Deep breaths.