We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Annie Jurrens . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Annie below.

Annie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?

I have had different work experiences that have helped me prioritize what I want my life to look like, and what I don’t want it to look like. I don’t want to commute hours a day, I don’t want to be stressed every time the phone rings, I don’t want to be somewhere where my skills aren’t valued. I do want to live within walking distance of my job, I want to have space in my life to do more than work, and I want to spend my days using my talents to build something that aligns with my priorities. The fun part of being a small business owner is that I get to continually make decisions about my business that align with my priorities.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My husband and I had three young kids when we moved to a new community. When I was ready to go back to work, it didn’t seem possible to have small kiddos and have two parents with typical 9-5 inflexible jobs. Even with kids in daycare and school there are days where they are sick, where school is out early, where the daycare lady has to take the day off; add in medical appointments and school conferences and honestly I don’t know how any parent of small kids is doing it with inflexible jobs. Instead of continuing a job search, we just decided to start working on something we had been talking about for awhile, something where our kids could be with us while we worked: building a space where people could come for community connection and resources. We started Refill Goods in 2022, a low-waste general store in Rural Southeastern Minnesota. We aim to be a bulk food store, but we aren’t there yet. For now we have sustainable household and personal care items, and other eco-friendly items. We also work with local artists and makers to consign their work.

We are in a period of connecting with other community members, business owners, and sustainability leaders in our region to figure out the best way for us to make a lasting impact.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

We enjoyed living in this small walkable community, but we decided to bring something it was missing. One of our goals in starting our business was to make friends in the area. Our pride and Black Lives Matter flags hanging by our front door are intentional. Some people are turned away because of them, but the right people for us love to see them and are surprised and delighted to see them in our community. By not trying to hide who we are and what we stand for we have been able to attract and build a beautiful community already. By focusing on who we want to spend time with and who our ideal customer is, and not trying to cater to everyone, we’re off to a great start to building something that will last.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

A big part of our brand is building local community, but we also have an online shop (www.refillgoods.shop). Part of our shop is a used bookstore. At one point we spent our time cataloging all our used books and putting them online, which was a huge waste of time. The return on our time investment was never going to be worth it, and trying to keep track of inventory is hard enough without cataloging things we may never get in stock again. We still want to have an online presence and are still tweaking to figure out the most effective way to get online sales, while having in-store inventory. When we started we definitely were not prepared for how complex inventory management is, and how much of our time it would take. We are learning and evolving our systems constantly.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.refillgoods.shop
• Instagram: @refillgoods
• Facebook: @refillgoods
• Youtube: @refillgoods
• Other: tiktok- @refillgoods

Image Credits
Becca Haugen @twelvetenphoto