In the first year of our first shop, every little accomplishment is a huge milestone. Today marks 6 months since opening our doors at the Annapolis Town Center here in Annapolis, Maryland!
Since we’re a 13 month pop-up, this half birthday also marks our lease’ potential halfway point. While it’s still too early to make any formal decisions on Green & Bean’s future, we are very much enjoying its present.
Brands
We now carry over 30 brands of eco-conscious, ethically sourced goods! And there’s still more to come! Shuffling new brands into the mix is a slow process. We want to keep things fresh and new, but don’t want to lose our identity along the way.
Our newest brands are Studio Wald, who make our flower presses in Cornwall, England; and Broccoli, an eccentric yet intelligent magazine dedicated to the cannabis plant (and it’s loyal lovers). Soon we will be brining in Dedcool, a nontoxic fragrance brand with sustainable packaging and Mara Vera, who make luxurious block-printed table linens and wall hangings. They each offer something new to the shop while still fitting into our aesthetic & ethical sensibilities.
Plants
I’ve found the plants in here are a little vain— I’ve never seen my plants grow so quickly, but they’ve also never had so many people complimenting them on such a consistent basis. Coincidence? The jury is still out on that, but we do host a plant swap now!
Bring a plant or cutting, take a plant or cutting. It’s a part of the shop that we do purely for the fun of it, and selling my plants makes me a little itchy to be completely honest. They’re very hard to part with, and I would prefer a plant in its stead as opposed to a couple bucks.
Gifts
Though not our initial intention, Green & Bean is very much a gift shop. After a month or two of hearing “Christmas” over and over in April and seeing how often people were buying things for other people, we decided to lean into the gifting aspect of our identity.
We now offer a growing selection of curated gift boxes, and even have a gifting questionnaire in case you’d like us to make something more customized. We’ve put together some great client gifts, packaged a bunch of chocolates as a sweet treat for an event, and help people in store put together box after box of special somethings for a variety of occasions.
What’s Next?
I would love to get our online presence to be a very equal extension of the physical shop. A lot of this is a learning curve, and most of the times we’re moving too quickly in real life to also keep up-to-date with the site. It’s just me and Aida for now, and between the two of us, writing a (good) profile on each of our brands, taking and editing photos for each individual product writing extraneous blog posts (such as this one) to give you a look into the back end of operations.
Summer does tend to be a slower season for retail, but we’ve taken advantage of that to make our website a less glitchy, more harmonious experience.
