We recently connected with Marci Huston and have shared our conversation below.

Marci, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers

My boutique store/bar is located in a house built in 1870. It is old, the floor tilts and slants, but it is super cool. We have a variety of products, including a room dedicated to tarot, saging, etc. We call it our woo woo room. Neither I nor my family or staff have any sort of sense to feel, see or hear other worldly experiences. However, people who come into my store can.

It first started with our staff member Vincent. He is a rescue dog. He started barking at blank walls and the fences on the back patio (our drinking area). A customer who was there at the time, told me he was barking at spirits. I said Oh and forgot about it.

Later on, a customer walked in and said you know you have a spirit here. She likes you, she likes the things in your store and she told me where the spirit hung out (in which room) Again I said Oh.

Again later, we had a class of special ed kids having their snack on our patio (we do alot with the High School SPED program at our nursery) so they visit the store on their walks. Anyhoooo, I was speaking with two teachers. The male said I would like to get my mom some earrings, I told him they are in the front room, and oh BTW, we have a spirit who resides in that room. The female teacher looked at us, and blurted out “her name is Mary”. And then told us, that she did not know where that came from, it just popped out of her mouth. So, now I am thinking OHHHH!

Fast forward, various random people have told me random things about our spirit who we have now named Mary. Mary followed me there, she is not from the house. She likes what we do, apparently. I have since incorporated other worldly programs into our event schedule. We have done past life regressions, twice. Mary showed up in my life in our second one. The psychic I use speaks to her for me. I am now incorporating childrens activities as events into our line up of events because Mary said we need to do more with kids. Since my place is not a kids place I basically didn’t do anything for children. That has now changed.

There is alot more detail to this. The story as I have written it is a true story. Whether all these people can see and hear what they do, I can not prove however, it is very curious to me that totally un-related to each other people, are saying the same thing.

We will continue to work with our psychic (she has a business in Monterey) because it is fun and people attend the events. She has spoken to my dead dad for me, and told me things about my kids when I asked, but again I want to really believe her, and I think I do, but my rational brain is telling me it is a bunch of baloney.

Marci, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We opened a retail plant nursery in 2005, but we are located out in the country. My real job is as a plant broker in the horticulture industry. In 2017 we wanted to have a location downtown so purchased property to open up a “garden center” called The GardenShoppe. Our town is small and people butt into other people’s business, so that is what happened in our planning stages. I was asked to add something with a wine tasting and venue for showers, parties, etc. Because I grew up in the beer business, I thought what the heck I will get a beer and wine license. So now my store is called The GardenShoppe n’ Bar.

I knew everything about the beer/wine business but nothing about retail. I have an MBA and a BS in business, but still have no entrepreneur or retail experience. I am just very tenacious. We are a boutique store with very clear values. The products that we sell need to fit our values, such as small business, woman-owned, veteran-owned, small batch, organic, and business for a cause. For instance, we sell deodorants that promote breast cancer awareness, candles and coffee that promote animal rescue, coffee that promotes women’s hygiene in Nicaragua, cloth napkins, and coasters that help give birthday parties to homeless children…the list is extensive. We probably have over 1,000 suppliers in our very small store that fit our values. Even our wines and beers have stories. We are trying to promote the idea of making your dollars count.

We are known now, for our unique gift ideas. We have moved into using a theme-type display arrangement. So rather than having a candle display or kitchen towel display, we have a pineapple display, a flamingo display, a military display, a movie and TV show display, etc. So, then all of our displays incorporate multiple types of products. We did this because every time someone would come in, they would say “I need a gift and my friend really likes mermaids”. We can easily then bring them to our mermaid display, unicorns, yep, crosses/angels, yep. stuff for teachers, yep. smiley faces, dogs, cats, rainbows, yep yep yep yep.

At the same time, we also have our large (meaning a large table-we are experts at verticle merchandising) seasonal display, Currently, we have a nice Valentine’s display and a Wintery type display (gnomes, hot chocolate, handmade marshmallows, etc.) We do have a display with wine glasses and other bar-type glasses along with coffee mugs, and examples of charcuterie boards, with the glasses, and food types already set out so people can grab and go. However, they don’t, but we still display like that anyway, because we have cool stuff and we like to show it off. Those items are also incorporated into our themed display. We have a separate jewelry display and yes of course we do sell house plants.

People like shopping and drinking at our place because it is calm, relaxing and has a friendly helpful staff person. We have been marked a safe place for various groups. Plus where else can you drink a glass of champagne and read snarky coasters and cocktail napkins?

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Anyone starting a business in 2018 like us, really had to have some grit to make it through COVID. Because we were a non-essential store, and a bar, we had so many different rules. We were shut for 3 months entirely, and then part was open and part was closed until 2020. We were pretty much closed for 1.5 years, right when we were gaining momentum. We then had to start over again. We own the property so being shut put a pretty good damper on our enthusiasm. At this point, we are still trying to ramp up again, because even though people can get out and shop, they are still easily distracted by online shopping, or just running to Target because of the convenience.

We changed the business model from boutique/bar by doing more of our own events and promoting our space as a venue, while at the same time being a boutique/bar. Too many types of events to list entirely, but a few are we host murder mysteries, about 4 times per year Monthly, we do something called a Meet, Greet and Eat for all the new people to town (our population is exploding here because apparently, we are more affordable than the Bay Area. We conjure up events, like National Unicorn day, we will do a planting project and show a movie (we have a 73″ large outdoor TV on our back patio).

We have done a Kentucky Derby Party and a Mardi Gras parade and Fat Tuesday event even though most people don’t even know/care about those types of events. We like to dress up and we like to have fun. We have turned the space into a Speakeasy on Saturday nights during the Winter with a live Saxophone player. Last year was pretty much a failure. We can’t believe the number of people who don’t even know what a Speakeasy is. So this year we are going to educate and promote. We dress the part and sell the hats, bow ties, etc. for others to dress up also. In order to host an indoor drinking area we have to clean out some of our retail space and bring in tables. Our only drinking area is outdoors, and it is way too dreary and cold in the Winter to be outside.

We are now going to put in place an indoor crafting night on Mondays, Karaoke on the first and third Fridays, and Game night on Tuesdays. We have to get very creative. It is exhausting.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

We had an idea to have a Black Friday sales event in 2021 and also do a 12 Days of Christmas event. We had no idea how it would be attended. We never do sales or markdowns on our products. So, we thought that we would hold a Black Friday half-off sale from 4 AM-10 AM. We, meaning my staff of 1 and I got matching pajamas and were ready to sell stuff at 4 AM.

We had sweets to eat and coffee. At 4:20 AM our first customer walked in. Trust me, I am getting emotional writing this. I was so shocked that someone would come in that early that I cried. That same person told us this year she was going to beat her time and she was waiting for us. We arrived at 3:59 AM.

We thought doing half-off deals on different themes for the 12 days before Christmas might be fun so we came up with the themes made flyers (yes flyers) and still didn’t know what to expect. Last year some people shopped every single day so we tried it again this year but added in a raffle of a really cool blingy hot pink ice chest.

It was awesome. People would walk in the door and tell us what day it was and that they were shopping for those items. The super cool thing is that we calculated about only 25% of the total per-person purchases were for the half-off items for that day, and the rest was general store product at full price.

We also incorporated a gift with a purchase. So for every $25.00 someone spends, they can choose a gift. The gifts were items that we had too much of (like hand Sani) or other little trinket things, like luggage tags, nail polish, and lip balm. People loved it, and we didn’t even promote it. It was a little surprise when they walked in. We will still keep doing it until we get rid of some of our excess items.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.gardenshoppeandbar.com/
• Instagram: thegardenshoppenbar
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegardenshoppenbar/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-gardenshoppe-hollister?osq=The+GardenShoppe
• Other: linktr.ee/thegardenshoppe