Retail and Restaurant Challenge 2024
When Karna Pettit was 15, she started working at Hallstrom’s Florist. Not because she loved flowers, but because she loved the ice cream. Now, about a decade later, she’s buying the long-standing flower shop from the Hallstrom family.
Karna will take over the business, which will be renamed Riverbend Floral Studio, in late September, when she’ll be the first person outside of the family to run the business since it was established in 1886 as a fruit and vegetable farm.
When the most recent owners, Dave and Diane Hallstrom, decided it was time to retire, there wasn’t a next generation of Hallstroms to take over, so they began to look for outside buyers. It took a while to find one, but when Karna’s name came up, Diane says, it was “an instant win-win.” The Hallstroms found a buyer, and Karna gets to do what she loves.
The keys to running a flower shop, according to Diane, are wanting to “see people smile” and an ability to enjoy the little things. It’s fitting, then, that Karna says her favorite thing about flowers is that they “make everything a little bit better.”
After working at Hallstrom’s for years, and working at a flower shop in Mankato while she was in college, Karna’s interest in flowers has now surpassed her interest in ice cream.
It also helps that she has ambition. When the Hallstroms agreed to sell the business to Karna, Diane asked Dave, “48 years ago, did we have the get up and go that she has?”
Karna, who graduated from Red Wing High School in 2017, has a lot of ideas for how she can make her mark on the business. First up is the reason the store is currently in a temporary location, on 419 Main Street. Renovations are underway in the storefront that the flower shop has occupied since 2003, and Riverbend Floral Studio should be opening the doors to the public in the first week of October. The major renovations include redoing the floors and taking out the staircase that separated the flower shop from the sweets shop. The changes, Karna says, are to make the store more modern, but she won’t change too much, because she wants to keep the “values and traditions of the old shop.”
One of those values is being community-oriented. It was something the Hallstroms were looking for in a buyer, and it is something Karna plans to do by offering classes. She hopes to have two classes per month, one based around teaching community members how to do their own flower arrangements, often with a seasonal theme, and a second class where local artists can instruct attendees in a non-floral medium.
She also plans to change the inventory a little bit. The flowers and houseplants, of course, will remain. So will the ice cream and sweets, but she plans to add more gifts to the store to go with the home décor section. Now, shoppers will be able to put together a gift basket from all the different corners of the store.
And this is where winning the Restaurant & Retail Challenge will help Karna the most. The grant money will go directly into her initial inventory. Karna had already been working on a business plan when she learned of the Challenge opportunity so, she says, she figured it was “worth a shot.” As time went on and she presented in front of the Business Development Committee, she started to realize winning was actually a possibility.
She did win, and says that the money was an “extreme relief” and has helped “put everything into action.” She’s also happy that the grant comes with business classes, because she acknowledges that she’s a florist first and a business owner second.
So in just a few months’ time she’ll be opening the store, and carrying on the tradition that Hallstrom’s started nearly 140 years ago. Diane says she’s “only a phone call away,” but trusts that Karna won’t need her help to keep Red Wing full of flowers.
Michelle Tracy
Michelle Tracy, owner of The Creative Hand, recently opened a hat bar, where customers can design their own trucker hat. And a lot of it is due to good timing.
She got the idea to start her own hat bar when she was scrolling through Tik Tok one day and saw that people had done them as a pop-up shop. She wanted to establish a permanent version in her store but didn’t think she had the money set aside to buy enough inventory and do it the way she wanted to. But that’s when she saw that Red Wing Downtown Main Street was offering up grants in the form of The Restaurant and Retail Challenge.
Michelle decided to throw her custom-designed trucker hat in the ring and eventually won. She used the money to start the hat bar, and the response, she says, has been “phenomenal.”
The hat bar is pretty simple. Customers can choose from a variety of colors and styles, and an even wider selection of patches, which can be purchased à la carte and arranged out on the front of the hat. Customers can take as long as they’d like designing the hats, and then Michelle can get them pressed and ready to go in five minutes.
And so far, the hat bar has attracted a wide range of customers. People have found all sorts of different occasions to commemorate with a new hat, and both adults and children have enjoyed the activity. In fact, more kids have made hats than she expected, so she is now ordering youth sizes to accommodate them.
Soon, Michelle even hopes to offer up hat making parties for groups, where they come in after store hours and have the hat bar all to themselves.
But that’s not all The Creative Hand has to offer. The majority of the items in the store are things like cutting boards, wallets, and tumblers that can be custom laser-engraved by Michelle and her heavy-duty printers. The fact that she can do this engraving is another case of her having good timing.
“I’ve been an artist and a crafter my whole life,” Michelle says, and when her children were younger she made money doing decorative interior painting and drawing portraits. Later she spent a decade as a paraeducator in the Red Wing schools, but it wasn’t until 2013 that she got a chance to consistently work a creative job. A year after leaving her job in the schools, she was on vacation when she and her husband decided it was time she got back into a job that used her skills. The day after she got home she got a call from a friend that she hadn’t seen in a while that she knew of someone who was looking for help with their framing and engraving business.
For six years she worked at what eventually became Backwoods Framing and Engraving. After starting part time and moving to full-time, she learned all sorts of new art skills, and equally important, she learned the skills necessary to run a business. But in 2019, Backwoods closed, and Michelle was out of work.
While she continued her creative pursuits, she was disappointed to no longer have the job as an outlet. “I would really miss my people and the friendships that you build,” she says.
But, her good timing came through yet again. “I pulled up for coffee at Mandy’s and there was a big rent sign in the window,” she says of seeing her storefront, just a couple months after losing her job.
She and her husband talked it over, and eventually decided she should start her own store. “We jumped with both feet, got a loan, and hit the ground running.”
She weathered the pandemic that started soon after she opened, one instance of her not having good timing, and has continued running. Before Christmas, she plans to add a jewelry line that be custom-engraved too. She also has pillows and dishtowels that can be customized with a sublimation printer, and she sells high-end pens and sketchbooks for people looking to do their own art.
It wasn’t just good timing, because Michelle has but her skills, experience, and drive to good use too, but The Creative Hand is here to stay.
Written by: Charlie Gillmer
Photos by: Pam Dusbabek