Come Visit Us at The Little Boutique on Fountain!

You may have read recently that we announced we’d be selling our products inside a downtown boutique with several other artists! It’s the most nerve-wracking thing we’ve done so far as a small business, but we are stepping up and making our dreams happen.

The Little Boutique on Fountain is located inside the Heritage Center at 117 S. Fountain Ave in downtown Springfield, Ohio. When you walk in the front doors, Un Mundo is to the left and we’re to the right! It’s right next to COhatch and we couldn’t be more excited about that! In the summer, the Farmer’s Market is right there! Ahhh, we are seriously so excited!! So many small businesses to support! 

For now, the boutique will only be open Thursday-Saturday with limited hours or by appointment. Believe it or not, we are all very busy people and it’s hard to find time to be able to open the place up during the week with everyone’s work schedules. Feel free to reach out to us any time and we can schedule a time to meet you up there! Over the summer we do expect to be more available. 

There are many artists sharing this location and that makes it even easier to shop local because there are many shops in one convenient location! There will be beautiful handmade jewelry, cute t-shirts, candles, door tags, and so much more! We’re bringing a TON of things into the shop including new items that you’ve never had the chance to order before! We did want to note, however, that the prices of some of our products may vary between our website and in-store. This is because the price of the items online is set to go hand-in-hand with shipping costs. For example, our stickers will be $3 in-store and $2 on our website because they’re not so expensive to ship with a stamp. We can only set one individual shipping price currently. Hope this makes sense! If not, feel free to ask us questions!

Our opening date will be the First Friday of March (March 5) at 3 pm, so exactly one week from today! We hope to see you there! Come say hi to everyone and make some new cool artist friends and connections!

When we were first asked to be a part of the Little Boutique on Fountain, we knew we had to jump on it! The night before we were literally talking amongst ourselves about how amazing it would be to have a downtown space - one with a huge window for our plant friends to enjoy. The next day, we were asked to share the very space we had been eyeing. How insane was that?! We are still in shock about it. We spoke it into existence or something because what are the odds?!

When we said the journey to get here was hard, we certainly mean it. There were so many times we thought we’d give up because we weren’t making any sales and we were overspending our budget to keep up with the costs of maintaining our business. One month we’d have 20 sales and then the next month we would have one. It was very inconsistent and honestly somewhat discouraging and that made it hard to have a positive mindset. Some days we’d stew in our depression and other days we would power through it and get so much done. Those days always felt better to us.

The enjoyment we get out of Sage & Oak is worth way more than the money we make so we decided to keep pushing. We branched out into so many different mediums and we have learned so much from them. We planned harder this year than ever before. We have spent the entirety of this year making ourselves a legal business entity which was a HUGE learning curve. It was terrifying but we got through it and now here we are - preparing to open the new boutique with other super talented artists! 

The moment we accepted the opportunity, we got busy creating branding for the boutique. The name was decided upon already so that made it easy. The logo we originally made featured a plant as the icon (oh, don’t act so surprised) but then we revised it to a simple graphic of the window to better represent the location. It was perfect! If you’re a local, you probably could have identified the icon without context. 

Then we had to start looking for shelves for our products. We knew the style we wanted, it was just about finding some at a decent price. We had baskets in mind for storage because we’re obsessed with the boho style. We needed a banner to show off our brand name so we designed it and got it ordered.

When our shelves came, we got everything packaged up nicely and safely so when you look through our baskets, you won’t be directly touching the products. They’re in nice clear packages for your safety and the safety of others. Those packages needed labels to explain what they were. It’s like the designing and labeling never ends, geez. It might not seem like a lot but when you have stickers, keychains, earrings, and necklaces to label that way, it was overwhelming. 

After days and days of labeling, we noticed it was kind of hard to tell what the products were in the baskets from afar. Shelf labels. We designed, printed, cut, laminated, and then glued on the magnets. Perfect and reusable since we are so indecisive.

Spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Inventory count after inventory count. Label after label. Design after design. Package after package. License after license. We are finally here and we are beyond ready to share this space with you.

So much went into being able to open this shop next week. It’s insane how quickly we learned and got things done. It’s true what they say about if you want it really badly, it will be attainable. I guess the moral of this blog today was to never give up. It’s cliche, yeah, but if we did, we wouldn’t be where we are. We got as far as we have because we kept pushing even on the days where we desperately wanted to give up. This started out as a hobby and now we’re here opening a boutique with other really cool artists. We must be dreaming. 

See you soon.

Also as a special thank you for reading this blog, take 10% off your next order with promo code: “BLOG10”!