Shop Small Spotlight: The Black Sheep
With a great team of Sarah Sprague, Lucas Meredith, and Daniel Koch, The Black Sheep was able to open their doors in September 2019. Open just barely a year, The Black Sheep is starting to make a name for themselves on the streets of downtown. As you walk into the doors of this general store, each corner is filled with different treasures from different artisans from jewelry to candles, and even a colorful wall of candy; it is a fun place to stop and shop and get a treat. We had to learn more about this general store in town so we asked them a few questions…..
The Black Sheep We were brainstorming with another local business owner when she suggested the name. We loved it, took it, and ran with it.
The Start Lucas & I (Sarah) have been making items and selling them at craft shows for a few years now and wanted to open up a brick and mortar - we weren’t really sure how we wanted to do it, but we knew we wanted to Include other artisans also. One of our good friends (Daniel) shared the same desire. The next thing we knew, we were signing papers and set an opening date.
Courage and Fire Does coffee count as an answer?! Haha honestly, between the three of us, we all have parts of running our business that just work for us- different tasks that each of us take on. Running a business is scary!! So, if we didn’t have each other, I’m not sure where our business would be.
The Hard Stuff Keeping up with what everyone’s likes and wants have been pretty difficult. We have to remind ourselves sometimes that we are not our own audience - what we may like, might not be what someone else likes. There are A LOT of behind the scene things that happen in order to keep a business going & pin pointing a few specifics is really, pretty difficult.
Inspiration I spend hours upon hours searching social media, grabbing business cards at shows, looking up businesses and their products & reaching out to them about putting their work in our shop. People will contact us or even stop in sometimes to inquire about being an artisan at The Black Sheep we are always looking for new artists and love the variety.
Favorites Oh goodness, all of them!! :-) We are pretty excited, however, about our new ‘Black Sheep Box’ this is a monthly subscription without the contract. Each month we will have mystery boxes that customers can preorder. These boxes will be filled with goodies from artists’ work within our shop. Each box is valued at $50 and we only sell them for $28. These are geared towards women, but we plan to have boxes for the guys at the beginning of the year.
Small Business Love The unity of our community- the people we meet, the other small business owners who we now call friends, and of course all our customers. We love having a little piece of downtown that we can call OURS.
Love Where You Live We love the historical uniqueness of a small town being brought back to life.
The Dream Our dream is to have a place for years to come where people want to go for unique, handcrafted, and locally made gifts.
Location
109 N Mulberry St.
Elizabethtown, KY 42701
Instagram @blacksheepetown
Facebook @blacksheepgeneralstore