The City of Bloomington Economic Development Division partnered with about 30 downtown businesses to kick off Small Business Saturday after Black Friday and the event continues through Friday December 2nd. Small Business Saturday promotes shopping at small businesses downtown. You still have time to shop and register to win individual giveaways at participating stores.
Cities 92.9 began our shopping tour visiting Red Raccoon Games, which we knew to be a popular downtown store, and spoke with owner Jamie Mathy who told us, “It’s been a great season. I think that beautiful weather is helping. People are walking around in T-shirts and shorts in the end of November in Illinois. That’s an unusual occurrence but I’ll take it.”
“And things are going very well,” Mathy continued. “We have been consistent all weekend long. … About lunch time there were people everywhere walking the streets popping in and out of stores downtown.”
We asked Mathy to tell us about his shop and he said, ” We ae one of the largest board game stores in Illinois. We have a massive selection of board games, card games, role playing games, minatures games. Basically if it’s not an electric video game it’s right in our wheelhouse. If we don’t have it, we can find it and special order it and bring it in for you.”
Mathy told us classic board games families can play together over the holidays still sell well saying, “You know what? I am always amazed at how many copies of Monopoly and Clue we sell. A lot of them we have the base games, the originals, but a lot of times people are looking for the specialty versions too. As an example, popular this year is Golden Girls Clue where the board looks like the apartment from Golden Girls and you have to discover who ate the last piece of cheesecake.”
After visiting with Mathy we continued north on Main St. and stepped in Bloomington Spice Works where we met Ruben Garnados who talked with us abut his store saying, “We have been doing really great. It’s an interesting year for us in general. We were over on Center St. for about three and a half years and we just reopened over here on Main St. Tuesday before Thanksgiving and it has been quite busy.”
“I think we have had somebody in here pretty much the entire time of day,” Garnados continued. “We estimated a certain amount of business and we have been running about probably four times that so exciting but also we are running. We are here a lot right now trying to catch up and do all this.”
Next we visited Ivy Lane Bakery and the first thing that hit us were all the wonderful aromas of bakery products and coffee. We spoke with Macy Lane who said Saturday mornings are always busy. Lane told us their, “biggest sellers are sugar cookies, raspberry scones, our cinnamon rolls and blueberry muffins.”
If you need sweets for a Christmas Party, Lane let us know that, “A lot of people will place orders. We do have a Christmas order form. It has a bunch of our different Christmas cookies on there. And people will place orders and we get them ready for them and they can just come in and pick them up and take them to wherever they need to go.”
We continued north where we checked out Rooted Studios, a house plant nursery, operated by Austin Arreola and Kristi Hofmann. When Areola moved his barber shop from Main St. to a different location, the couple wanted to set up another business on Main St. and Hoffman developed the idea for the plant nursery.
Hoffman told us, ” I graduated from ISU (Illinois State University) right when the pandemic hit … and I just wasn’t to confident in going into a career field when the pandemic hit so when he (Arreola) had the opportunity to do something with the space I just, I’ve always always wanted to open a business of my own. My family has always had small businesses. So I was just driving one day and love plants, we both have so many plants, I was like what if we just try a little plant shop?”
Hoffman continued, “They were so popular at the time too because everyone was staying at home and people were buying plants to keep busy. And we spent hours and hours doing research and I was trying to find distributors and pots, plants I wanted to carry. When I pitched him the idea he was like, yes, let’s do it and it just took off like there was no questions we just went for it and it’s been a success.”
We completed our shopping adventure at 2 Frugals Thrift store because everyone loves great deals and we needed a few things. After filling our “Shop Small” reusable bag we asked Kim Mattson what the number one selling items were in her store at Christmas.
“Garland, ornaments, tree toppers, wreaths, we have it all.” Mattson said.