Good Neighbor Podcast: Milton & More
Bringing Together Local Businesses & Neighbors of Milton, Crabapple, and Hickory Flat
Good Neighbor Podcast: Milton & More
EP #138: Evimero Marketplace with Natalia Beley
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Embrace the enchanting tale of Natalia Beley as she invites us into her world at Evimero Marketplace, where the fusion of fashion and ethical consumerism paints a vibrant community canvas. Stepping into her Georgia-based boutique is more than a shopping experience; it's a journey into the very heart of conscious commerce, where every item tells a story of fair trade and sustainability. As Natalia unveils the emotional narrative behind her store's name and her personal evolution from a fashion merchandiser to a purveyor of positivity, listeners will be captivated by her dedication to enriching lives and lifting communities out of poverty.
During our intimate conversation, we uncover the myriad joys and hurdles of being a community business owner, where customers become cherished confidants and local shops craft the unique fabric of our towns. Natalia's tale is one of resilience and expansion, sowing seeds of change with new loungewear and baby products that adhere to her stringent eco-friendly ethos. As she emphasizes the importance of a collaborative spirit among local entrepreneurs, we're reminded that when we choose to support small businesses like Evimero Marketplace, we're not just buying goods – we're investing in a brighter, more ethical future. Join us and let Natalia's commitment to making a difference inspire your own everyday choices.
This is the Good Neighbor podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Stacey Polar.
Speaker 2Hey everybody, I'm excited to be chatting with Natalia Bollet from Evie Merrow Marketplace. Welcome, Natalia. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Stacey, yeah, we're excited to get to know you and your business a little bit more. So why don't you start off by telling us about Evie Merrow?
Speaker 3So Evie Merrow Marketplace is a gift shop primarily focused on fair trade, ethically sourced brands, small emerging brands here in the US and Georgia, local Georgia brands. We carry a lot of locally made things and then we also work with several nonprofits also that are using social entrepreneurship to fund their work.
Speaker 2Awesome, awesome. And where does the name come from?
Speaker 3So it actually means to thrive in Greek. We were sitting around. I actually wanted to name it Thrive Marketplace, but, as I'm sure most of your listeners know, thrive Market is a huge business already, so that was already taken. So we were trying to think of other names that were kind of in that same vein. And so we're Christians. The New Testament is written in Greek, so I was like, what is Thrive in Greek? And so that is actually how we came up with the name. So it's a little unusual, but if you walk into our store, on our back wall behind the cash wrap, it tells you what it means.
Speaker 2Awesome, awesome. What do you talk about your journey? Tell our listeners how you got into this and what kind of inspired you to open up your own store.
Speaker 3So my background is actually retail, buying and merchandising. I went to the University of Delaware as a fashion merchandising major. I went to FIT in New York and graduated as my associates from there, also as a merchandising major. So I've been in the industry for a long time and I've always thought about opening my own store. Over the years I've had different kind of like iterations of what it could be and my family and I moved here in 2019. And again the idea kind of came up.
Speaker 3I have a friend in Pennsylvania, where we used to live, who owned a fair trade store and I used to shop there a lot. And there was also this other little store that I used to shop at. That was just local get, it was all just Southeast Pennsylvania makers, that was it. And when we moved here, we moved to Roswell. I didn't really see anything that was kind of like that around here and we kind of stumbled upon this vacant little space off of Canton Street and my husband was like, oh, why don't you? You know the rent was really affordable. And he was like, why don't you try it and see how it goes? And then from there, a couple of years later, we moved to Milton.
Speaker 2Awesome, awesome. Can you talk about, maybe, like your passion and why fair trade means so much to you, and maybe talk a little bit about some of the nonprofits that you partner with?
Speaker 3Sure, yeah, so a few years ago actually this was still when we lived in Pennsylvania I, a friend had recommended a book and it was all about the fast fashion industry and that's kind of where not fast fashion necessarily, but I had come from the apparel side and so I understood about, you know, most of our clothing is manufactured overseas. You know, I understood about, you know, manufacturing production, that kind of thing. But this book kind of really opened my eyes to what that process is really like and the impact on not only on the people in those communities but also on the environment. And so it just kind of became a little bit more conscientious about the things that I'm buying, the things that I'm purchasing, kind of taking that second look at a label and seeing you know where something is made and making sure that the company is, you know, practicing, you know ethical business practices. And so that kind of was like the beginning of, like, my interest in it. And, like I said, I had a friend who owned a fair trade store and worked with a lot of nonprofits and loved seeing just how some of those organizations were using business practices, were using entrepreneurship to try to like lift communities out of poverty, and I had done a mission trip years ago to the Dominican Republic with an organization called Hope International that does microfinance work, and it was all kind of in that same. They were all kind of like those same threads. You know, they were using business and people starting their own very, very small businesses to try to make a huge impact on their own families and on their communities.
Speaker 3And gosh, we work with a bunch of nonprofits. One of the ones that I can think of is just off the top of my head is Prodigal Pottery. They are based out of Birmingham so I love like the Southern connection as well as the fact that they're a nonprofit and they actually do. All of our pottery, all the pottery that we have in the store, all the mugs and everything is from Prodigal Pottery and they work with women coming out of the prison system, homelessness, trying to give them, you know, real work experience, trying to build up there, help them to build up their resumes so that they have something to, you know, put down to get that first job and give them real world experience.
Speaker 3Also, another vendor that we've worked with for years, a Starfish Project. They work, they're a nonprofit as well and they work in several Asian countries working in the red light districts in those areas. So they're a group of expat women that were, you know, american women that were living in Asia. They're pretty discreet about where they're working because of the kind of work that they do and they started spending time in the red light district and ended up starting a jewelry business and it's become a pretty successful business and a lot of the people who are running the business now were former workers in these brothels and stuff. They do the photography work, they do the website, I mean, besides just making the jewelry. So those are just two off top of my head. But there's a bunch of nonprofits. I mean that is like something that I love supporting is entrepreneurial nonprofits you know, awesome, awesome.
Speaker 2Can you talk about any myths or misconceptions that might be out there about you know running a store or the product lines you carry or any of that kind of stuff?
Speaker 3Oh my gosh, there's a million about running a business. Obviously it's you know that it's you just open the store and that you know you build it and they will come. And that is definitely not true. I think, especially you know, post COVID some things have kind of changed and just the amount of like perseverance that you have to have, the just kind of like the positive attitude, I think if you are at all a pessimist this business will kill you in, you know, a second. So just going in and trying to like stay positive when things because this business ebbs and flows, I mean dramatically the retail business just does, you know there's times when things are great and then times when you're really like having to be super creative and so it definitely is not just an easy. You know, just open your business and people come in and you're just making money and everything's you know up and to the right.
Speaker 3That is a huge myth. And just the amount of you know work and especially, I think, as small business owners, we kind of I always say that the store is my third child. So I have two boys and the store is my third child and it's my neediest. I always say it's my neediest at this point it's you know, my kids are a little bit older and like it just consumes so much of my energy and my time. I mean, I love it, but it's the amount of work that you need to have to put into it to make it work is definitely something that I think even I I don't know if I anticipated you know just how much of my mental energy and emotional energy would go into it.
Speaker 2What other challenges have you faced since opening the business, oh?
Community Business Owner Shares Success
Speaker 3gosh. Well, we've had a lot of personal things that have come up. We opened the Roswell store. My dad got diagnosed with Alzheimer's when after that happened, so I was trying to manage. So that's been more of a personal struggle that and I'm an only child of him, his only caregiver, so he was living in New Jersey. I mean it was, and you know, I'd open the business and at the time I was the only person working there, so I was manning the store every day, I was doing all the things, and that was the time I think, when, you know, it was time to hire someone else. And I like just such a blessing that I brought someone onto the team that could help, kind of support me, and that I trusted and she was fantastic and helped me for that first year. But just to be able to have that like somebody that I could trust, that could be at the store and while I was handling some personal things and going back and forth to New Jersey and bringing my dad eventually bringing him to live here in Milton, but so that was probably the biggest thing that was going on. I mean, gosh, we opened the store in 2020, so it was 2020, it was COVID and all this stuff with my dad.
Speaker 3Even thinking back now, I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm like, how did we even, how did I even like manage? But, like I said, the Lord knew what I needed. Stephanie came on board and she was fantastic and my customers were also just so great at knowing that. Like hey, sometimes the store is gonna be closed because I got family things to deal with, and that's.
Speaker 3I mean, I think that's part of the beauty of having a small business and being the owner and kind of like living in your community too. You know, is that like you really get to know your customers, they get to know you, they become your friends. I mean, they are kind of like intimately involved sometimes or know a lot about what's going on in your life, and you see them often, they pop in. So I mean that to me, is it's one of the reasons that I want to own a business in the community, that I live in, not just like have a business a half an hour away and not live there, because I just I don't know. To me that's just it's a good feeling.
Speaker 2Right, right, I know that you talked about kind of, you know, working a lot and always having business on your brain. But what do you like to do when you're not working? How do you relax and what do you enjoy outside of work?
Speaker 3Oh, lots of things. I'm like a hobbyaholic but I play tennis. I try to play tennis, you know, one or two days a week if I can, and I've been playing even when we lived in Pennsylvania. So it was great when we moved here because it's such a tennis community. My husband and I play, you know, pickleball. We like hiking, we honestly just love, like well, ride our bikes. We live near Crabapple so we ride our bikes over there and, you know, have a drink at Six Bridges a lot of Saturday, you know, evenings or whatever. So, yeah, just spending time with my husband, my one sons in college, but the other one that's still here trying to enjoy these last few years of still having kids at home.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, anything else that you haven't said about your business that you wanna share with us.
Speaker 3No, just I think I think this is such a great opportunity to really highlight, like, the businesses that we have in our community, you know, and that's, I think, what differentiates. That's what differentiates each community right, each town. It's like their local businesses and the people that run these businesses and just how important that is. Like I, I see businesses closing and I'm like, oh my gosh, like imagine if everything was just like generic stores, you know, if the whole world was just like targets. I'm like that would actually be pretty boring and you probably wouldn't love living in that community.
Speaker 3Like that's what makes it special is just like walking in town and seeing all these different you know slightly different business ideas and getting to know, get out with the owners and those are the people who support your local. You know baseball teams, little League soccer, high school theater program, you know all the things. So I think for us to remember that, like, if we want to have these unique businesses in our community, we really need to be out there supporting them For sure for sure, any new things coming for the spring or summer, any product lines that you're hoping to bring in, or yeah, we're actually that's funny, I was just emailing one of my vendors just right before this so we're actually hoping to bring in a little bit more loungewear type clothing.
Speaker 3We're going to test out a few women's like more casual women's lines that are all like either have some like sustainability aspect or, of course, are, you know, ethically produced overseas or here in the US. And we're actually growing our kids like our baby toddler section. That has been actually one of the more successful areas in the business we're finding, because I'm talking to people there really aren't a lot of places to get a nice baby gift for a neighbor, you know, your granddaughter, whoever. So that's been like we're slowly growing that assortment of baby gifts. We're actually starting, hopefully this week with we're going to be able to do monogramming.
Speaker 3We actually found another small business in Milton that we are going to partner with so we're going to be able to monogram like baby blankets, little lovies that we carry, and we're going to be bringing in more things that can be personalized. So, really, and we're going to hopefully be bringing in one or two baby toddler apparel lines. So a little bit more like organic kind of special pieces. So, yes, I'm really excited about that opportunity and, of course, like one of our values, is creative collaboration, so we love working with other small businesses in the community.
Speaker 2How about pet products? Do you guys carry anything or think that would be a hit in that area?
Speaker 3You know what we don't? We carry, like, we have our dog traits from the peer center, which is also a nonprofit that works with adults that are aging out of the disabled, adults that are, you know, not school age anymore, and we carry bandanas and little things like that. But we actually have a dog store that's opening in Crepe Apple Market very soon. So that is, I'm kind of letting them that be their thing.
Speaker 2Nice, nice. Well, good deal, good deal. Well, why don't you share with us where folks can find you, your location? Social media, that kind?
Speaker 3of stuff. So we're Evie Merrill Marketplace. We're 1890 Heritage Walk in Milton, georgia, and at Crepe Apple Market, and you can always find us on our website, which is wwwEvyMerrillMarketplacecom. And that is our social media as well Facebook, instagram. We're super active on there, so come and follow us.
Speaker 2Awesome, awesome, all right. Well, thank you so much, natalia. It was so good getting to talk to you today. Thanks, stacy.
Speaker 1Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor podcast Milton and More. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPMiltoncom. That's GNPMiltoncom, or call 470-664-4930.