We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michelle Pedersen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Michelle, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

My business partner, Saralynne and I really wanted to open a boutique. We were inspired by museum stores and wanted to make a store that featured art and design for everyday life. A lifestyle store with all categories, but a modern, art forward aesthetic.

We did a business plan, and basically got together daily to start planning steps. We used SCORE (free mentors to learn more about what we didn’t know), researched online and talked to other store owners.

We decided to start by opening a pop up/mobile store in my VW pop top bus. We went to local art/craft fairs, looked on line, talked to people we knew and found makers whose pieces spoke to us and asked if we could consign their stuff at our new pop up store.

We got together the pieces and displays and did our first pop up before christmas, figuring we could get the holiday bump to start us off. The first pop up was an utter failure, 1 sale, to a friend, ugh! The first lesson we learned was location, location, location. We were across the street from a popular christmas art/craft fair. But the street was a busy one and where we were, nobody would cross the street to get to us. We had better luck the next time we tried just down the street a little from the craft fair. But still not near the sales we had envisioned in our heads.

We popped up in different craft fairs which was a ton of work, but very little pay off.

Then we found a space in a shared space concept store… we basically had a little store/booth in this larger store (which we manned) We did this for a few months. We didn’t make a lot, but we were getting better at the basics of running a boutique. We decided we needed to look for a proper brick and mortar location. Which we eventually found in Atwater (which was the neighborhood we were most interested in) We both put money in so that we could buy product, fixtures, fix up the store etc.

Our rent was pretty low and we weren’t able to pay ourselves much at all for the first year, but eventually things turned around. We still consigned with a lot of local makers, but we had traditional vendors as well. Within a year we moved down the street to the space we really wanted to be. Our store continued to grow every year. We were a big part of making Atwater a hot destination in LA.

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

I was a photographer before being a store owner. I was struggling with back pain and having difficulty doing the job. My son was born and we soon learned he was on the autism spectrum, so I spent most of my time working with him, taking him to therapies, etc. By the time he was in school. I was ready to work more again, and I thought about how I always had wanted to open a store. I talked to my friend Saralynne who was an art director for magazines and the magazine she was working for moved to NY. And she had the same dream of opening a boutique. We both had a great eye for art and design, but not a lot of know how about business. The learning curve was steep, but we kept at it, and people really liked our vision so we had happy customers. Our brand is art and design focused items. Life. Style. We have an appreciation for snarky as well as beauty. We are inspired by Bauhaus (hence the haus part of treehaus), form follows function. We believe that art and design should be woven throughout your life, not just for your walls. Getting dressed is a form of creative expression, Everything that is part of your life should move and inspire you.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We opened a second store because we were doing well and thought it was the next step of growth. We found a space we loved, but the location was not as ideal. We should have paid more attention to that detail as we created a beautiful space but didn’t have enough customers to sustain it. We were losing money rapidly and it threatened to pull our entire business under. We had to try to get out of the lease, which cost us a lot, but in the end was worth it as we couldn’t keep putting good money after bad. We are still working to dig ourselves out of that hole financially, but we have been able to keep going in our original location. We learned important lessons about location, limiting costs, and not assuming that we had to keep expanding to be succeeding.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met Saralynne at a therapy for our kids, we both have children on the autism spectrum. We clicked right away, we both shared a love of art and design. We had a similar aesthetic in a lot of ways. And we understood the struggles of raising a child on the spectrum. We wanted to give back to the autism community when we started our business, so we did regular art openings and donated money from that day to local charities, and once per year we put together the Atwater Cares about Autism fundraiser with local businesses in order to raise money for Autism related charities.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.treehausLA.com
• Instagram: treehausLA
• Facebook: treehausLA
• Yelp: treehaus