Heart City made its debut in Cloverdale as a holiday pop-up shop in December 2019, opening full-time as a “modern day five and dime” in February 2020. Now, shop owner Erin Turko is going back to the store’s roots, opening up the shop for makers who want to use part of the retail space to hold their own pop-ups.
“All along this was our plan,” Turko said. “We wanted it to be a true community makerspace.”
While the front of Heart City is home to brightly colored knick knacks, decor, stickers and more — something that won’t change with the formal introduction of pop-ups and classes — the back of the shop is open.
At the beginning of July, she put out a call on social media asking makers of all stripes — bakers, candlemakers, woodworkers, artists, anyone in between — to contact her if they were interested in having a long- or short-term pop-up at Heart City. From there, she amassed a list of people interested in either the shop hosting them for a pop-up or having the shop carry their product.
“We don’t charge anything and we don’t take anything, so it’s not part of our business platform as the shop of Heart City,” Turko said. “It’s just open the space up to the community and we want to continue doing that.”
Now it’s a matter of sorting through the list. Turko said that to start off with, she’d like to get to the point where the store has at least one pop-up a month, if not every weekend. She noted that pop-ups can be longer than a day or a weekend, depending on what someone is interested in. The space, she said, is also open to teachers, creators and craftspeople who want to hold classes but might not have space.
Last year, the store hosted a holiday decor business named Santa’s Attic from November through the end of December. It’s also held pop-ups with traveling bookstore All Things Book, numerous pop-ups with Flour Girl and, most recently, a pop-up with pancake purveyor Fluffy Little Pancakes. The pancakes, Turko said, had community members lining up out the door.
“It was just so unique and something that Cloverdale had never seen before,” she said.
This weekend, Turko said Shannon Moore will be bringing her Flour Girl treats — complete with new cake offerings — back to the shop from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. as part of the Cloverdale Sidewalk Sale.
“We’ve done so many with Flour Girl. They’re always super successful, super fun, the product is sweet and colorful and all of the things that Heart City is,” Turko said.
In the end, she’s hoping that allowing creators a space to sell their products will encourage more people to both come out to Heart City and support small business owners and to encourage more business owners to seek out retail spaces in Cloverdale’s downtown.
“People are always proud to share their product and what they make, so I’m hoping that they’ll promote and share that and bring people to downtown Cloverdale,” Turko said. “That it’ll be an opportunity for people who maybe aren’t ready to open a retail space, but to have an opportunity to see what the market is like. What I really hope happens out of it is that somebody decides to open a shop in Cloverdale.”
