The Charleston Gazette

August 8, 2005

Business

Showcase West Virginia to open on Quarrier Street

By Jennifer Ginsberg

jginsberg@wvgazette.com

After four months of sitting in boxes, the merchandise at Showcase West Virginia will soon sit in a store where sunlight streams through the windows.

The store, which sells products made by West Virginia artisans, will open at 906 Quarrier Street at the end of the month. It left the Charleston Town Center in April.

Customers will still find many of the items like wine and pottery, wood and metal products that sold in the mall store, with fewer souvenir-type things like key chains and shot glasses.

The store will focus on artier handmade items, said Megan Douglas, enterprise manager for the nonprofit Center for Economic Options, which runs Showcase West Virginia. The demonstrations and product tastings will continue, she said.

The store has some new handmade scarves and jewelry. Before Christmas, customers will be able to find handcrafted furniture and home décor pieces like lamps and lampshades that didn’t fit in the mall store. Artists could eventually offer workshops or an artist-in-residence program in the store’s mezzanine level.

This is the store’s fourth location in four years. The first three moves were within the mall. Pam Curry, also of the Center for Economic Options, realized it was time to leave when the center was paying $9,000 a month in rent and noticed flat sales last November and December.

So, the center’s employees boxed up the merchandise and put the fixtures on a tractor trailer truck for storage. They’ve been using the past four months to redesign the store, evaluate new products and update their cash register system that’s tied into the accounting system.

Showcase was slated to move into Appalachian Power Park. Although the store’s name was painted on the side of the brick building, the deal fell through when it became too expensive, Curry said.

The staff discussed several locations including Huntington, the East End and Corridor G. But Quarrier Street was a “no-brainer,” said Curry, who is the center’s executive director. The downtown street has some neat shops and is a bustling location for retail, she said. The store will sit between Blossom Deli and the Consignment Company and across the street from Art Emporium.

The business owners have already talked about joint marketing and recruiting new businesses to the area.

“We really feel like Quarrier Street could be like the next Capitol Street if we could get some interested stores down here. We could feed off of each other,” said Tammy Krepshaw, owner of The Consignment Company.

She and Curry would like to see a baker move into the building at the corner of Quarrier and Hale streets. A health food store with organic produce, a bookstore, bead shops and boutique clothing shops could also add to Quarrier, Curry said.

The street could be like a village where customers park their cars and leisurely shop door to door. She calls it “easy shopping without gridlock traffic.” Curry feels the new Showcase West Virginia with its walls painted in apple green and robin’s egg blue hues and unique merchandise will add to the area’s boutique-like ambiance.

“People are going to be able to have shopping experiences that are fun, instead of saying, ’Let’s go to the next box store’ ” she said.