Two new businesses held their grand openings on Mount Vernon’s First Street during Shop Small Saturday.
A Hill of a Deal and CRC Coincraft, both located at 118 First Street West (located down the hall from The Sweet Factory), were seeing an influx of customers during their first weekend in business.
Tara Comley, a Kirkwood Community College business administration graduate, has been running a thrift store business on Facebook the past several years.
“I loved doing resale and coupon shopping, and this store is a way to pass some of those fantastic deals I find onto the local shoppers,” Comley said.
The couple started with selling items on Facebook by stocking them in a spare bedroom. They quickly outgrew that space. Then they moved to their first storage unit. They outgrew that storage unit. They outgrew a second storage unit. And then a third.
Then the pandemic hit, and the sales on Facebook helped tide some of that initial uncertainty.
After the pandemic, the couple were missing the face-to-face interactions with customers, so they opened a retail space in Marion.
“But we started hearing from some of the customers we met in Mount Vernon that they missed us,” Tara said.
The couple was looking for space for a business storefront in Mount Vernon, and found it in the same building as The Sweet Factory.
“We had a soft opening Friday, Nov. 19, and I’ve already got to start restocking some of my shelves,” Tara said. “We saw many new faces as well as some of our customers we knew from our Facebook sales, and a lot of that was commenting on what great prices they were seeing.”
Many of the pallets Tara purchases have minor box damage or minor cosmetic damage, but are otherwise great products. She sells many of the products at 50 to 95 percent off retail.
Tara noted they sold more than 600 items in the first few days of business and she was gearing up to restock shelves ahead of the Shop Small Saturday event in Mount Vernon. She also has more than 1,000 new items on order and on the way for the store, and expects Tuesdays will be a big day where people can see new inventory on shelves.
Chris and Tara have lived in the Mount Vernon community since 2017. Chris is originally from Central City, but has called Mount Vernon home since 2011.
The couple are sure they want to maintain the space in Mount Vernon moving forward.
“Owning a business space here in Mount Vernon really makes the time fly in a day,” Chris said. “We’d been commuting 40 minutes to Marion each day round trip, and when you own a business in Mount Vernon, you really gain that commute time and are right here.”
Chris’s business CRC Coincraft started as a hobby at the top of the pandemic.
“I was watching people who were turning coins into jewelry on YouTube,” Chris said. “I realized I could do this myself and started to teach myself.”
Chris had previous metal fabricating experience.
He continued treating the coin rings and other items he made as a hobby from March 2020 until August of this year.
“Then, my lucky penny keychains just exploded on Facebook overnight,” Chris said. “I had over 1,000 orders almost overnight for the items, and it became a business as opposed to a hobby.”
Aside from keychains and rings, Chris makes guardian bells, guitar picks, and even small dreamcatchers, all with coins.
Chris loves working with some older coins that he’s found or collected.
Tara and Chris have used metal detectors to locate coins for the business, which lead to Chris discovering a 1943 Walking Liberty half dollar in the Nature Park of Mount Vernon, an item he was able to turn into a larger ring.
For Chris, the thing he really enjoys is working with his hands in these metal fabrications.
Aside from the retail space in uptown Mount Vernon, Chris also sells his wares at Etsy and Facebook Marketplace.
During Nitty Gritty Antique Sales, Chris had a booth not far from The Sweet Factory and the future shop for the store.
A Hill of A Deal and CRC Coincraft will be open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Fridays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. Sundays and Mondays they will be closed, with Mondays being a restock day for the store.
Both stores also maintain Facebook sites, where they give peeks of new inventory that can be found at the stores.
Hill of a Deal, CRC Coincraft open on Shop Small Saturday
December 2, 2021
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.