POLSON – Karen McMullen had known since March that the fitness center that leased the Main Street storefront she and her husband own in Polson would be leaving.
Filling the space wasn’t a problem — there was interest from attorneys, insurance companies and a mortgage company.
But McMullen didn’t like the idea of turning what she considers a great downtown retail space into offices.
When no other retailer entered the picture, she and her husband, Bob Marsenich, did.
Now downtown Polson has not one new merchant, but 15 of them.
Treasure State Mercantile evolved as summer arrived — along with the tourists who flock to Flathead Lake — and the building was still sitting empty.
And boy, did it evolve quickly.
A friend, Ellen Buchanan — director of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency — told McMullen what was happening to vacant buildings back East, where old five-and-dime stores like Woolworth’s had closed.
“These two- and three-story buildings were reopening, filled with artisan booths,” McMullen says.
The seed planted, McMullen came up with a plan. She pictured her store filled with arts and crafts made by local people, and advertised for such.
What she ended up with was something a little different.
There is that element to Treasure State Mercantile — artists such as Marvie Redmond, Sara Gunderson and photographer Kathy Shore have leased wall space from McMullen. In one of the small glass display cases that can be leased, 11-year-old Emma Franz of Missoula and her grandmother, Pat Wolfe of Portland, Ore., offer Emma’s handmade earrings and Wolfe’s tiny watercolor paintings.
But the bulk of the store’s 1,800 square feet of retail space is taken up by other retailers.
Shiree Dupuis Ryan, who owns the Family Health Pharmacy and Gift Gallery in Ronan, leased two sections of the store and stocked it with everything from bear, elk and deer carvings, to kitchen utensils and monogrammed wine stoppers.
Maren Rae, whose store across the Armed Forces Memorial Bridge in Polson — Maren’s Rare Gifts — might be seen as the competition, is instead part of the fledgling business. She, too, leased space and brought some of her largely imported inventory into town.
Robin Ohriner, who has a summer home on Flathead Lake but owns a business in Las Vegas, rented a 27-foot truck and hauled dolls, fairies, Christmas decorations, children’s books, games — even a case of $300 Ed Hardy sunglasses — from her Gifts of Distinction store in Nevada to sell at Treasure State Mercantile.
Roberta Anderson of Polson designs jewelry that is made by silversmiths in Rajasthan, India, and mostly sells it internationally as a wholesale distributor — but she rents two cases of retail space in the store.
Store manager Bobbie Goldberg has a space to sell satchels and purses. McMullen’s sister, Linda Suson, has a space offering collectible dolls. Even McMullen rents a small area from herself, where she and Goldberg offer women’s plus-size clothing.
McMullen believes the eclectic offerings, with prices that run from a couple of bucks to $1,000, make for interesting shopping.
“I have turned away some people,” McMullen says. “The product has to be something I think people will want to buy. And I don’t take anything second-hand.”
How’s it work? Well, there’s nothing here on consignment. Neither is Treasure State Mercantile a co-op, where vendors take turns staffing the store.
Instead, McMullen leases out spaces large and small, with each lease tailored to the person renting it. She has one last piece of prime real estate, a 116-square-foot space near the front door, available for $235 a month, but others go for as little as $50.
She also charges a management fee that comes from a percentage of each merchant’s sales. The fee is agreed to in advance. Once it is hit each month, nothing more is deducted; if it isn’t covered through sales, McMullen says the merchant isn’t required to come up with it from some other source.
The merchants take care of their own stock; otherwise, McMullen and her husband provide the retail space, management, handle the sales, pay the four-person sales staff and the utilities, and buy all the advertising.
“I don’t have anything to compare it to,” McMullen says, “but we’ve provided more shopping in Polson, the vendors are getting checks every month, and it really seems to work for a small-town Main Street.”
She, her husband and Goldberg were sitting in the then-empty building on June 15 when she decided to go forward with the idea.
“I just didn’t want an empty storefront in Polson in the summer,” she says.
They advertised for artisans, marked off retail spaces, installed new carpeting and lighting, added built-in display cases, and opened just two weeks later, on July 1, with eight to 10 merchants signed on.
Now, nearly 20 people — the individual merchants, the sales staff and McMullen and her husband — are receiving income from the store.
“We had repeat business by the second week and we’ve been almost full since mid-July,” McMullen says. “My mom died June 19, and ever since then it’s felt like we were riding on the wings of an angel.”