While this might seem like a weird topic for a metaphysical-themed blog, if you put it in the holistic context of body-mind-spirit it makes a lot of sense. (We’re planning on hosting self-defense classes at the new store for the same reason.)

Ah, Oklahoma. What can you say about the weather here? Not too cold, usually, which is really nice. We have enough beautiful days to really make it worthwhile to put up with the accompanying allergens (tree pollen, ragweed, etc).

But in the spring, Mutha Nature puts on her leathers and goes on a violent spree from time to time. WtF is up with that, Momma N? Well, never mind the cause: severe weather is on the menu from March through June, and if you live in Oklahoma you just have to expect it and be prepared for it.

Make a Disaster Kit.

Your disaster kit should be stashed in your emergency area; use a covered plastic bin. Include:

• a basic first aid kit (lots of bandages for cuts from glass and puncture wounds)
• several water bottles
• a few terrycloth towels
• paper towels
• antibacterial cleanser
• baby wipes
• a box of dust masks. Tornadoes are messy, throwing that red mud everywhere!
• leather gloves if you have to move sharp or pointy things
• rubber-type gloves (latex, etc)
• emergency rations, like Clif Bars, enough to get you through a couple days
• your family’s household notebook. More on this below.

There is always a huge public response to tornado victims, so you won’t necessarily need to stash food, like you would if you were in a hurricane area. But it might be a while before you get fed again and people get grumpy if they don’t eat.

I keep red towels for emergencies on the theory that the “patient” can’t see how much blood there is and therefore won’t be as likely to freak out. Dark colors work too.

Optional items:

• a hand-crank flashlight
• a hand-crank radio
• a change of clothes for each family member
• some toiletries (soap, toothpaste, etc) in case you have to spend the night at a shelter.

More important than toothpaste is a pair of tennis shoes, because if you have to climb through rubble, you will not want to be barefoot. An easy way to do that is if you wear out some sneakers or hiking shoes, instead of throwing them out, stick them in a plastic bag and stash them in your safe room. (The bag keeps the dust bunnies out.) Otherwise just know where your tough-soled shoes are and keep them close at hand (at foot?) during storm season.

What we do is when we see the potential for tornadic activity, everyone in the household is responsible for throwing together a go bag of their clothes, toiletries, laptop, eReader, mp3 player, cell phone charger, medications, etc. Being in a shelter is pretty boring, so be sure to put in a book at the very least.

Candles are a bad idea – natural gas is probably going to be leaking, and if not that, then possibly gasoline fumes from overturned vehicles, or vapors from spilled household chemicals.

So, no candles, OK? Great, let’s move along.

The Household Notebook and Personal Security

If you are in a natural disaster, or really any kind of emergency situation, it’s so much easier to get your bearings or to have others step in to help if you have some important information written down somewhere.

In a loose-leaf notebook, preferably using those plastic page protector things, keep the following documents and information:

• emergency contact information – people who should be notified and their contact info
• home and auto insurance policies, especially the pages that show your coverage!
• an inventory of your household stuff, with make, model, and serial numbers where possible
• copy of your lease or deed to your home
• copies of the titles to your vehicles
• a certified copy of all family members’ birth certificates and social security cards
• a copy of everyone’s photo ID cards, such as school ID and/or driver’s licenses
• copy of your passport
• a current picture of each family member, including pets
• health insurance registration cards or other paperwork verifying your health care status
• doctors, dentists, optometrists contact information
• a copy of all prescriptions being taken by people and pets
• a copy of your vision prescription in case you have to get new glasses
• child custody paperwork!
• phone numbers for professionals you work with – lawyer, accountant, child care provider, personal chef, chauffeur, and those guys who come fix stuff when it breaks
• banking information – account numbers, institutions, and check/ATM card numbers
• credit card info – make a copy of the front and back of the card. Make sure you have the customer service phone number on the paper, too.
• sealed copy of your will
• any other documents you might need in an emergency, as you see fit.

So you’re thinking, OH MY GOD THAT’S AN INVITATION FOR IDENTITY THEFT!!! And if you’re not thinking that, you should be. Yes, yes it is. Big time. Which is why you are NOT going to leave this documentation just lying around any old place where a common thief or workman or whoever happens to be hanging around with your teenagers can pick it up and make off with it. You are going to put this in a very safe place, such as your safe room, at the bottom of your emergency bin. And then you are NOT going to tell anyone about it, other than your family members, and your highly trusted person who will be digging you out and taking your unconscious butt to the hospital.

If you have a home-based business, include your vital business records in a second notebook.

If you think about it, uh, where are you storing that information right now? Get it in a safe place!

Your Super-Secret USB Drive

One of the things we learned from Hurricane Katrina is that in a storm-related disaster, your documents might get destroyed, or get wet and start to mold before you can get back in there to rescue them. So scan things into pdfs – everything mentioned above, plus

• a text file with your ownership information!
• a document saying whom to call (in case you are found unconscious wearing the drive) and your health information
•  a document including photos of your family (including pets), who they are, physical description, any distiguishing marks, and health information
• marriage license
• pet registration, vet and groomer information
• gun licenses, carry and conceal permit, hunting or fishing licenses
• the past couple years of tax returns
• some favorite family recipes – more important than you might think
• a comprehensive home inventory, with photos and video
• important photos you would really grieve over if you lost
• scans of diplomas and professional certifications
• website login and password information, especially for your utility companies
• security questions and answers if someone has to go in and deactivate all your accounts
• backup of your cell phone contacts and address book
• backup of your browser boomkarks
• a copy of a calendar with important dates, not only birthdays but also upcoming appointments like doctor appointments

Make separate directories for things according to your privacy needs. Put the urgent emergency information (the first three documents) in a file called “emergency”, “open first”, “urgent”, or something similar, something a responder will know to open it up right away.

Other important information, like your hunting license or diplomas, don’t need too much protection, but password protecting that directory is never a bad idea.

Super secret information that is nobody’s beeswax but your own, you’ll want to protect with strong measures. Encrypt the files individually, zip them up, encrypt that file, and then password protect the directory you put it in.

You can email these things to yourself if you have a very secure host. If you get bonked on the head and lose your memory, it would be a good idea for a second person to have the password. Be subtle, use it in a sentence, or something – don’t just send an email that says “the password to my super secret USB drive is sasQu@tch”.

HIDE the drive in your disaster area, in a ziplock to keep it from getting wet. If you have relatives and/or friends you can trust, you might want to make a second copy and let someone else hang onto it, but be extremely careful about where it goes. Bring it with you if you have to go to a shelter but otherwise leave the thing at home. The city cops are really good about managing a disaster area, but you may experience looting if you are in a rural area.

As regular maintenance, make backups of your cell phone directory, address book, browser bookmarks, important mail and documents, and especially your digital photo album. We keep ours on an external drive that’s stashed in a very secure place away from the computer. We were robbed a few years ago, and the thieves took the external drives, causing us to lose a lot of precious photos. We were prepared for a crash, not a theft. A natural disaster can be a lot like a theft, so think of things in those terms.

A bank’s safe deposit area is almost never compromised by a tornado, so if you have a safe deposit box, put your USB drive and backup drive in it. An external laptop sized drive will fit into the smallest size box (keep it in an anti static resealable bag).

During tornado season, keep your habitat cleaned up.

It helps to prevent your stuff from blowing all over the place if it doesn’t start out looking like a tornado hit it! This is easier said than done for most people, but if the season starts out stormy, just do your best to put things away when you are done using them and work on cleaning up those problem areas. Ask yourself, “do I want a FEMA volunteer thinking I’m a slob when they come help me move my neighbor’s car off my roof?” That should provide enough inspiration to keep you going. It also makes it a lot easier to grab stuff as the sirens are going off.

Also get your yard cleaned up. Keep all your clutter in your garage or shed, not loose where it can become a missile in 100mph winds. Cut the grass regularly, and spray for ticks as soon as you can in the season, not afterwards when half your house is in the front yard. I got Colorado Fever and a friend of mine got Lyme Disease when we sustained tick bites while helping a mutual friend remove other people’s stuff from her yard following a nasty tornado. We were out of commission for weeks and she had to do most of the cleanup herself.

For cleanup, you’ll want a lot of those heavy-duty yard waste bags. The contractor style ones. They can be pricey, so maybe buy one box each month and keep them in your disaster area. (How many bags you will need kind of depends on how many trees your neighbors have.) They can hold broken glass and pokey metal bits. Glass is probably the biggest problem, so you will also want to stock some heavy duty gloves for everyone. Don’t forget sunscreen and especially bug spray.

That’s all I can think of at the moment – let’s hear your tips too! Also, if you know of mobile-friendly URLs for live local weather updates (such as your local news channel) please post them in the comments. During the last round of severe weather, I was able to connect my computer to the internet since we have a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) and the cable modem still worked even though the power was out. But a lot of the folks online were connected via their cell phones’ mobile browsers. The cell towers will most likely still work even if your landlines are down and the power is out.

Stay safe!

WOW too much time has passed since I updated this blog. But I have made a couple of recent changes that should help me out a bit.

One – low hanging fruit – made a twitter account. So you can now stalk us @SilverMoonOKC woot!

Two – installed an app for my phone where I can allegedly type up some posts and send them off. We’ll see how that goes.

So let me talk a bit about the shows I went to! First there was the Halloween and Party Expo in Houston, where I attended some classes and also met up with Heidi from Eldorado. She really opened my mind to a product line I had not previously considered – adult products. Nice ones, not porn shop wares. Things like organic body balms, all-natural lubricants, and some very sleek high-end toys you might consider displaying as works of art (although I have been assured they are just as nice in the dark). Our market is about wellness, and I realized I had been overlooking this aspect of “Body Mind Spirit”. In retrospect, it’s really obvious, but I do have my “duh” moments.

Not very Halloweenie, but certainly party! We will be installing an Eldorado affiliate shop on the website where you can order all manner of lovely things for your personal Garden of Hedon.

Then I went to the MAGIC show in Las Vegas, in February. This is a humongous trade show that focuses primarily on clothing. It was way, way overwhelming. I mostly went for the seminars, where I learned a LOT about nerdy web and marketing stuff. But I also looked for vendors who would fill the “goddess gown” needs, Hawaiian and Indian style shirts, Bali pants. And found a few costume vendors that I really liked, people who make gothy, steampunky, renaissance, and club wear. Since a lot of our customers are into fantasy it would make sense to carry some of these, but I’m not sure if that’s something that would be a regular line or what. I’m thinking that it would make sense to have an ordering soiree where we schedule a day for people to come in and look at those catalogues, pick what they like, and prepay, then we will place a one-time order and when the items come in, we’ll call everyone to come and pick them up.

At the MAGIC show we reconnected with Amber from Alchemy 1977, an awesome gothy midrange jewellery company. We will also be putting up an Alchemy 1977 affiliate on the site, so you can start ordering from them right away. Their photos don’t do the product justice – they are really nice, good quality stuff.

Art Deco Bat Necklace from Alchemy

We also found someone to manufacture some teeny moon charms for us. Right now our “alessandre” line carries small hearts on the necklaces and bracelets, but we’d rather have silver moons to go with our name. So we’ll be ordering those and making them our little trademark on the alessandre jewellery.

Then just recently Jordan and I got back from a week in Las Vegas – two trade shows ran concurrently. ASD is a general merchandise show, everything from c-store, hookah lounge, clothes, perfumes, toys, and home dec. I was excited to find several companies who can mass produce and package our signature fragrances – Aphrodite, Antonio, Esteban, and several others (and the Ninja clone when it’s done!). We’re not quite at this point yet, but I look forward to bringing them in maybe in about three years.

Found lots and lots of really cool, awesome stuff to put on the shelves. Everything from lava lamps to huckleberry candy treats, eco-friendly thermal mugs, goth faerie statuary, dark skully stuff, animal totems, and Catholic saint statuary and cards.

ASD had two days of somewhat useful classes – some were more useful than others, but unlike MAGIC they were all in one building, and mostly all in one room. So that was really helpful and kept the stress levels low.

And then I got to spend a whole day at ILS – the International Lingerie Show. Oh My God. This was so much fun! And they *fed* us – I’ve never ever been to a trade show where they have complimentary food for the customers! It makes sense – if you stay for lunch, you will most likely stay at the trade show, and the vendors will make more sales.

There was also a small Halloween/party show in connection to this one. One of the things we liked on that side was some high-quality spray-in hair color. I’m not sure how that would work on the shelf, but I want it. The vendor was doing demos and it just looked so cool.

I got a lot of catalogues on various adult products, from toys and lubes to t-shirts and greeting cards. We’ll probably mostly focus on the bath/body aspect (massage oils, bath salts, candles, lubes, tasty dusting powders), but I can see us bringing in a small adult toy section. I don’t like the sleaze factor of Christie’s, so what we carry would be tasteful, elegant, comforting, and fun. Christie’s can be raunchy – we’ll be “boutique”.

Although I’m also trying to figure out how to bring in these delightful crops we saw – they look like  a bouquet of roses if you display them in a vase. And there is a braided leather “vine” with soft leather rose buds if you are the sort who likes to be tied up. They were so nice, how can I not carry them? They’re the kind of sweet naughtiness that makes you just want to play with them (and I’m not particularly into that). To design a boudior around them. I think I may have actually said “squee!” when I saw them.

Isn't this just so cute?

This is making me wonder what, exactly, kind of store we’ll be. Gifts – yes, metaphysical – yes, music – yes, books – er, probably a few, but we’ll probably have a Kindle kiosk or something. But then expanding our soap/lotion/lip balm line into massage oil and lubes, and our personal care section from handknit washcloths and loofahs into back massagers and adult toys, we’re not sure how that’s going to work here in Oklahoma City. But I think it’ll be a nice sideline, and it does go together, if you think about it. I’m looking forward to your comments and suggestions!

As I mentioned in the previous post, we’re kinda looking at another location (50 Penn Place). The leasing agent wants me to take down the post about Wish Bracelets (and our budget expectations) because he thinks it will give the mall’s owners some reason to charge me more money, or not work with me, or something.

Dear 50 Penn Place owners/managers — the above-metnioned article has nothing at all to do with you. It does, however, have a lot of relevance to our local customers, who seem to think retail space grows on trees.

It’s important that our customer base understand what happened to us in the past, why we closed, and what the mistakes were that we’re trying not to make again.

Last time, we were severely underfunded (we opened up on a frayed shoestring budget of only $5000). Yet somehow we still pulled through, and managed to start making a profit just a few weeks into the venture, plowing back every penny into new merchandise, better fixtures, and advertising.

I bought an occasional pizza, but I never took a paycheck the three years that shop was open. This go-round, I need to make enough not only to pay the overhead and buy new product and advertising, but also enough to pay myself, at least one other employee, and put aside some funds for future opportunities and/or emergencies and also stick some in a Keogh. I’m too old to not get paid this time – I’ve got to play for keeps now.

What that means, in terms of location: in order to receive the gross income that will make paychecks and savings possible in addition to growing the product lines and funding advertising, I need to attract not only my loyal pagan customers, but reach a wider audience of New Age Christians, yoga practitioners, angel people, and eco/greenies. Peaceniks and middle aged women who are on a spiritual, but not pagan, path.

They are not attracted to the kind of store I had before – the swimming pool blue walls and the checkerboard floor, DIY showing through proudly at every level. No, these people want to feel calm, protected, soothed by a metaphysical shop. I want to give that to them. Nobody else is doing it – not since Explore (OKC) closed in 2001 or Good Vibrations (Norman) closed in 2006.

I can provide both a Starwind and a Nature’s Treasures experience under one roof (although the pagan stuff will be clustered together in its own very special room). But this means a nicer location than the little hole-in-the-wall shop I had in the Asian district. And you know what? I want a nicer location than that old POS place, too, it’s not just for looks or to lure in upper middle class women. I did the starving artist thing, and it didn’t really satisfy. Time to upscale.

We’re not doing this again.

Yes, it’s really, really important for the public to understand that it is their responsibility to support a metaphysical shop if they want it to stay around. I’ve been told I’m absolutely insane for giving them a second chance after they “let me fail” during the recession.

On the one hand, I think that’s a lot of crap, but on the other – where did they go during those critical weeks in the summer of 2005? They keep finding me and they all express regret that I closed the doors when my lease ran out, but you can’t run a store without having sales to support it. I am willing to open the doors again, but only if they are willing to pull together to support the store. All the money, you know, comes from their sales – I don’t get a check from the government or a grant from a humanitarian association. Sales, and sales alone, are what keeps a retail store afloat. I kinda think that maybe somewhere in the back of their minds they had the idea that a metaphysical store is kinda like a church, or something – donations? United Way funds? Nope, only sales. If they don’t come in and buy stuff from their favorite shop, the favorite shop goes away. Such is the math of consumer economics.

So I’m very sorry, Leasing Manager or Owner, if that article somehow offends you or tips my hand with “how much I’m willing to spend” opening a new store. $15,000 is 5 months’ income to a lot of people – if they are fortunate enough to have that kind of a job. A lot of my customer base falls into that description. They are dedicated, loyal people with big hearts. I didn’t tell them last time that we needed funds, and by doing so, I let them let me fail.

I believe that if I had shared this information with them then, they would have made a determined effort to try to come in, and bring friends with them, back in 2005. We might have gone under anyway, but I think not making the process of running a business more transparent hurt me more than keeping quiet about it.

This time, every penny I can scrape up is on the line. I can’t afford to fail. If I can’t find the right place at the right price, there will be no store. So if your price is too high, you won’t be my landlord – I’m not champing at the bit to rent space in a mall that’s been dead for a decade. The math has to be right, so I will keep my weblog posts, thank you very much, because my relationship with my customers (who have followed me from market to market and show to show through the years) is more important to me than how much you think you can get from me. If the price isn’t right, you won’t matter. But the customers always will, and this blog is for them.

So, what’s up then?

We’re looking for a storefront. We’ll probably wind up buying a small building somewhere, because the math is better, but we’re still open to renting if we can find the right place.

Thought we had a good possibility at NorthPark Mall, but turns out the owner doesn’t like People Like Us.  Explore, a shop that was there for a while in the 90s, had to move out because they sold tarot cards. Yeah they’d probably (who am I kidding – definitely) have a problem with us – good thing we found out before we signed a lease.

Fifty Penn Place is another possibility – we love the space and it’s right off the highway. Great location, except over half of the retail space is vacant. This is what’s known as a “dead mall” – and they’re asking $12/foot for the privilege. However, a new leasing company has taken over, so we’ll keep an eye on them. If they can rejuvenate it, we’ll certainly consider it. The proximity to a lot of radio stations (there are a few in the office tower) might gain us a bit of free publicity, if they are interested in doing call-in tarot readings during the morning show or something like that. And the conservative talk radio station can bemoan us aloud, which is also publicity. Any publicity is good publicity, as the saying goes.

Here’s our Official Policy on that kind of stuff:

Please! come and protest outside! We will buy you pizza and soda and everyone will get on the news. It’s totally win-win (as long as it’s peaceful protest – you leave your rocks in your pockets, and I’ll leave my bullets in my gun).

There’s space in Bricktown but I personally hate having to pay to park. The tourist trade would rock for card readings, so even though Bricktown is at the bottom of the list, it’s on the list.

So that’s where we are in terms of a location – neither here nor there, literally. Still spinning our wheels on the Information Superhighway. If you know of a good location that’s favorable to Our Kind, please let us know.

In other news, Ande’s been going to trade shows and learning lots of stuff, checking out shops in other cities to do market research, and the studio is a huge mess from the spate of shows we did in the 4th quarter and January.

We’re not doing ANY more shows until we get our mess cleaned up, the tax paperwork turned in, and the website headed in a direction we like. The chaos makes me think that maybe I’m not really, deep at heart, all that serious about the biz. Gotta reign it in a bit because even I’m starting to feel unfocused.

We now feel that the economy has gotten about as bad as it’s going to get. Since it’s pretty hard to fall off the floor, we are now cautiously optimistic about bringing the shop back to life.

The past six years have been brutal for many folks. Unemployment, a debt crisis, a massively expensive war that has way outlived its purpose, a housing fiasco, and sooo many corrupt elected officials — all of these just beat down on the people. For many months, it just seemed like things kept on getting worse and worse.

We felt the squeeze too: instead of being able to sell a historic home desperately needing renovation we couldn’t afford, we lost it to foreclosure. It was full of toxic mold and we literally had to flee for our lives, so frankly we’re actually pretty relieved that it’s someone else’s problem now. But when I closed the shop, I expected to get a job for a while, and instead found myself unemployed for the better part of five years.

This was not so bad, we didn’t really need two incomes (it’s pretty cheap to live in Oklahoma City). That is, it was all right until my domestic partner recently spent four months also being unemployed. Our savings is wiped out now, but at last a job came through and things are going to be OK again. *whew*

Needless to say, I won’t be able to get a small business loan for a while. That’s normally how you do it, you come up with about half of the funds and you borrow the rest. But you know what, I don’t think a small business loan would be a good idea right now, even if someone would lend it. Cash in hand is what feels right. Lots of cash.

We’re looking at an opening budget of around $15,000. Most of the old shop’s fixtures went away when we fled Mold Manor, so we’ll need to buy new ones (or at least new to us). We may have a problem locating used fixtures, though: after a bunch of stores went under, the local used store fixture depot also went out of business.

The shopping center we’re looking at is not the fanciest, but it’s nice. The price is also nice, but it’s not cheap. We have narrowed it down to two choices: one that’s $1100/month and plenty big for a retail store, or one that’s $2000/month and big enough not only for the store, but also for activities, classes, haflas, dances, feasts, and other fun things.

One of the things we didn’t have space for last time was classes, and after doing much research on what makes a metaphysical store really take off we’re strongly leaning toward the larger shop. First and last month’s rent plus a deposit is already over $5000, and this shopping center requires expensive illuminated signs.

Why, oh why, did I name the business Once Upon A Silver Moon? That’s 24 characters (well, 21 + 3 spaces). I should have just named it The Store. (Already taken – by a bar.) I test marketed the idea of a new, shorter name, and everyone said No! Stick with the one you’ve got, people know who you are! Well, that makes sense.

So that’s about $8000 for fixtures, rent/deposit, and signage. That gets us in the door, but before we do that, there’s more to consider.

We’re pondering the idea of operating the open space as a non-profit, possibly even as a church. Paperwork, filing fees, and palm-greasing. Another grand.

The place we’re looking at has no interior walls so we’d have to put some up. I can probably manage to assemble a crew (lots of theatre tech friends), but the raw goods are probably going to run around $800. Paint for the place will be $200 by itself, just based on square footage. The floor’s OK so we won’t need new tile or carpet. But we will need an electrician to add some outlets to our new spaces.

Once we have the walls up, we’ll need additional lighting. In retail you just have to have good lighting. The existing fixtures are not enough and they are those awful noisy fluorescents. Our old store had those and everyone hated them, especially us. Budget in $2000 for energy-efficient spots and LED bulbs that won’t need to be replaced for years.

We’ll be a WiFi hotspot so we’ll need a honeypot network. Tables, chairs, filing cabinet, desk — basic office furniture, and a color laser printer for labels since we make most of our products.

So at that point, we’re legal, furnished and fixtured, we’re lit up, and we have a fresh coat of paint on the walls, all for the nice low price of $12,000. >gak!< There’s still nothing on the shelves and we haven’t done any advertising yet, but you can do a lot with a studio full of raw goods and $3000.

So WTF does all this have to do with Wish Bracelets?

Every time we sell a Wish Bracelet, 100% of that money goes into a special fund for the start-up costs.

That’s a helluva lotta bracelets, you’re thinking.

Well, yes. But we do have some of the money coming in via a tax refund (if the IRS doesn’t sieze it), and we think maybe we can get some through crowdsourcing.

Also, if we do decide to go with a non-profit structure, at least for the yoga/class part of the business, theoretically we might be able to get some grants or tax-deductable donations.

But the Wish Bracelets are a way that the average customer can contribute actual money to our actual start-up. People love to make a difference to someone’s life, to their community. And OMG, every dollar makes a difference right now, and the Law of Attraction says that if we can get those dollars coming in, more will follow.

These little bracelets are going to help us right now, but once we’re up and running, we won’t need to raise funds any more. We will have achieved that goal and the business will support itself, like it should.

So here’s the beautiful part of this: we will keep the Wish Bracelets as a fundraiser, but instead of going to us, we’ll find a good cause and donate all the money from Wish Bracelet sales to it. People like Wish Bracelets; we used to sell at least one or two every day. Most of the customers would buy them for their own needs, so this looks like a winning solution for everyone.

We’re partial to the Red Rock Youth Shelter, which is part of a larger organization. Among many other services, they provide housing and counselling for GLBT teens whose parents kick them out for being gay. Our old store had a wish bowl where people would put in their spare change. We were really proud to be able to help them out.

So we’re looking ahead to what we can do once we re-open the store. Not just what all we’re going to sell, and not just what cool events and classes we’re going to be able to offer. Not just how we can bring even more pleasantness to the lives of our customers, but also how we can contribute meaningfully to our community and a cause we really care about. But to get there, we’ve got to get open first, and to get open, we’ve got to raise money.

Please consider buying a Wish Bracelet to help us today, so we can help others tomorrow.