Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Maggie Stoll. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Maggie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
I came up with the idea for Burke Mercantile while working for almost a decade in corporate fashion. I was losing passion for my career in the mass market environment, and at the same time was discovering a lot of small independent brands that were operating in a more conscious and mindful way. This was at the height of early instagram, when the algorithms were really organic and you could discover so many like-minded accounts. As I began exploring more small businesses and brands for my own consumer needs, I felt like there was a hole in the local market here in Long Beach for consciously made goods that were more modern in design. Long Beach is well known for its strong vintage scene and has an inherently sustainable small business community, so I saw an opportunity to be a part of that by adding an assortment of contemporary offerings!
The shop assortment really began centered around sustainable fashion, but I knew I always wanted to expand the offerings to include art & lifestyle goods as well. I’m super inspired by art museums, galleries, and art museum gift shops. I grew up in a small town in Ohio where there wasn’t much art and culture available to me, and experiencing the amazing museums and galleries in Los Angeles County when I moved to California really shaped my interests and creativity. I was in awe of the artwork, the stories, the presentation, and the accessibility of these public spaces, and I wanted my shop to offer that same kind of discovery experience. I do believe this has given me a unique approach as it plays into how I present my products and my space both in person and digitally, has informed the way I’ve designed the interior of my shop over time, and is what drives me to search for really special, unique goods that my customers aren’t likely to find anywhere else nearby. Being able to support small and emerging brands and artists along the way is just the cherry on top!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Maggie Stoll, and I am the owner, operator, and curator of Burke Mercantile. I am the sole employee and owner here and am a self-funded micro business. I have over a decade of experience in fashion and retail, and I also offer creative consulting services including interior styling, spacial design for commercial spaces, design/build services with my partner who is a fabricator, as well as home/business organization and visual merchandising! I love having the creative control over my own business and boutique, but I also absolutely love being able to serve other small businesses with design and merchandising support. I’ve even completed some residential design projects for some of my amazing customers from Burke. I’ve been blessed to share my passions so widely with my community! I believe our physical environments can have such an effect on our daily lives, and can be positively enriched so much through design and use of space. I especially love the challenge of making a big impact with what already exists or with limited resources, so I love being able to support small and micro businesses like myself who are building their own brands from the ground up. We need these spaces to continue to exist in our communities!
Burke Mercantile is a modern lifestyle shop that brings together conscious fashion and contemporary design from independent brands. I’ve talked about how the shop was born and has developed, but one thing I am most proud of is my Burke Residency Program, I implemented this program when I moved into my stand-alone brick and mortar almost 5 years ago now. My shop is just under 500 square feet and so my space and my budget is always limited, but I wanted to find a way to continue bringing new brands into the shop for my customers, and offer space for emerging artists and designers. The Burke Residency Program was born as the answer to this. Through the program, I feature a clothing collection and a collection of original art in the shop on a quarterly basis. The collections live in the shop and are available for sale for 3 months at a time, as well as our online shop when applicable. We complete a thorough interview with each Residency participant that is posted to our blog, shared with our email subscribers, and posted on our social media during the residency. When I started this, I wasn’t sure how much interest there would be from participants for a short term pop-up model, but it has turned out to be wildly successful! My customers really look forward to seeing each new participant, and many of the artists who have shown here had their first ever art show here and have gone on to have successful careers with their work! That has been the most rewarding and amazing thing to experience and be a part of. To date, I’ve hosted 28 different residencies in the shop, and I can’t wait to host more!
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
My entire journey living in California has built my resilience, and it’s something I’ll forever be grateful for. I moved to Long Beach two weeks after graduating college in Ohio with what would fit in my Toyota Corolla. I had taken an internship in Orange County the summer before my senior year of college, so I made some friends out here that let me couch surf in their small apartment in LB when I decided to make the big move out here permanently! I was able to get a couple part time service jobs and convince a college house mate to move out here from Ohio too and sign a lease with me. That was 15 years ago next year! One of my part time jobs was for a corporate fast fashion company which I worked my way up in and built a career in for eight years. After eight years there and dreaming about opening up my own shop one day, I quit my job and begged a local retail shop owner to hire me full time so I could get experience in running a small business. I took a huge pay cut to do this, but I knew this experience was going to be necessary if I ever wanted to seriously consider starting my own business. The shop owner was Melissa Carpenter who owns The Hangout in Long Beach. I was lucky that she agreed to bring me on, and she has been my mentor for the past 8 years. I was able to get that crucial experience through working for her that led me to opening my own shop in 2018. She has continued to hire me for visual merchandising and design consulting all this time, which has supported me while starting my own business, and led me to other great opportunities.
When the Global Pandemic hit in 2020, I was less than a year into my first stand-alone brick and mortar space. I was just starting to feel settled, starting to build a customer base, and see opportunity for growth and stability. When my business along with everything else was forced to shut down that all changed very quickly. I was lucky to have already worked to build my online business along with my storefront, so I was able to quickly shift my focus there. I moved about half of my inventory into my tiny 350 sq ft studio apartment at the time, and started running my online business from there. Since then, it’s been a rollercoaster of business shifts, financial stress, and a very unstable industry from a very unstable economy. But I feel so accomplished, and also just truly lucky, to still have my business standing, surviving, and dare I say sometimes succeeding! Long Beach has provided me a place to really grow as a person, be challenged, and flourish.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
During the Pandemic working to protect my business and ever since, I also wanted to make sure I was pouring energy into protecting my neighborhood and community. Having no immediate family in California, my local community here has turned into chosen family for me. I feel like I wouldn’t be here and Burke wouldn’t be successful if it were not for the strong love and support I get from my Long Beach community that surrounds me. So I also worked closely over the past few years with some other small business owners to start putting work into connecting our community members and uplifting our neighborhood. I worked to support events returning to our neighborhood to drive foot traffic back to our small business community, I built and manage a website for our neighborhood that hosts a small business directory, events page, and more while volunteering to help manage our neighborhood’s instagram account to support the discovery and tourism of our amazing small business community. Through all of this, I’ve gotten to build such amazing relationships with my small business owner peers in Long Beach and I believe many of us have survived the last few years by really working together and uplifting one another. There have been many times over the past few years that have been so financially challenging I thought I might have to close, but my community has shown up for me time and again and it’s helped me prove to myself just how resilient I am and how resilient entrepreneurs are, and so I will continue to show up for my community as much as I can! While I’ve garnered a bit of a following from customers based on some of the amazing brands I carry in the shop, I think I’ve built a strong reputation locally for what I try to pour into the community. Like most people in Long Beach, I love this town and the people in it so damn much, so I will always try to protect and uplift it! I will forever be grateful for the second home it has provided for me, the family I have gained here, and the opportunity it has given me to pursue my dreams.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://burkemercantile.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burkemercantile/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/burkemercantile/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/burke-mercantile-long-beach
Image Credits
Luis Zavala Tapia