Grand Junction met the criteria for Williams Mercantile’s owner to leave Indiana and open a second store.

Tim Harty, The Business Times 

A customer was looking at a woman’s top on display at Williams Mercantile on a Friday afternoon when Stephanie Williams spoke up. She sensed what the customer was thinking, because Williams was wearing the same top.

“It looks better wearing it than it does on the rack,” Williams said while pointing at the top she was wearing.

The customer ended up buying the top.

It doesn’t hurt to have a store owner who wears what she sells, making her at times a living, breathing mannequin. Williams believes it helped in the aforementioned instance, because the customer could see how it fit and covered Williams.

Williams Mercantile is a small, family-owned store that sells casual-lifestyle apparel and products, and it’s new to Grand Junction’s downtown. Williams opened it June 23 at 535 Main St., making it her second Williams Mercantile store.

The original store resides in Indiana in a town of about 13,000 people: Bedford. And if you check out both stores online and can’t tell the difference, then Williams achieved what she set out to do.

“I wanted to create the same feeling in here as we have in our Indiana store,” she said. “And so far, my customers have said, ‘Wow, I can hardly tell that it’s even different.’ That’s the goal, right?”

But she’s going to have to make a change when referring to the Indiana store. She caught herself calling it the “home” store, but that is no longer the case. Williams is already in Grand Junction, and soon her family – husband and three of her five kids; two have left the nest – will join her. The Grand Junction store has claimed the title of “home.”

Now that Williams has found a large enough place to rent, she also can stop sleeping in a rooftop tent atop her 12-passenger travel van.

That tent and van, though, speak to a key reason Williams Mercantile is now in Grand Junction. Williams said she and her husband were looking to head West, and the search for a city to put Store No. 2 ended with Grand Junction getting selected.

It checked off the most boxes.

“Doors just really kind of hadn’t opened until we really started looking this year at different towns,” she said. “It made sense for both the family and the business, and Grand Junction was the town that had the biggest crossover: Opportunity for the store with a beautiful downtown storefront; opportunity for my kids in good schools; access to the outdoors.”

The importance of the third criterion comes with this explanation from Williams: “We’ve traveled a lot of the country, coast to coast, with our kids, camping, road tripping, and national parks. We’ve visited 27 national parks. We love a good national park.”

It doesn’t require a very long look at a map to realize the hub Grand Junction is, and Williams expects her family will seize the abundant opportunities that are within a few-hours drive.

She also mentioned her second daughter is a student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Daughter No. 2 has no intention of leaving Colorado. So, if mama wants to see her, Grand Junction’s a much shorter trip than Indiana to Boulder and will allow more frequent visits.

“She has absolutely loved it here,” Williams said of her CU student, “so she’s been a cheerleader for her siblings to be like, ‘You’re going to love it out here if we get out here.’”

The draw of the West didn’t start with a vision of a second store. Williams at first thought, “Maybe I’ll need to land some big job to get out here. And then I decided, ‘No, maybe I just need to open a second store to get out here,’ so that’s what we’re doing.”

Getting the current location was another story, and the condensed version is Williams thought she had a spot lined up, but lost it because she wasn’t willing to make the longer-term commitment that the landlord preferred.

But the dashed dream appears to be the better outcome. Her commercial real estate broker in Grand Junction, Sid Squirrel, had another possibility become available when Crescent Moon Spiritual Goods vacated 535 Main St. to grab the larger space at 537 Main St. when Loki Gear moved back to Colorado Ave. in the spring.

Williams recalled Squirrel saying, “‘Hold on, OK, I think I got something else. It’s smaller. Would that be OK?”

She told him that would be fine, and Squirrel sent her photos to review, and Williams saw Store No. 2 come into focus, especially when she noticed the small, open space. It was similar to the size of the Indiana store, and it wasn’t going to require renovation.

“This one is, like, move-in ready and gorgeous,” she said. “And because it’s a little bit smaller, it made it even more, like, ‘safe.’ … Financially, it made it even more safe to go for, because it’s a little lower rent than what I was looking at committing to. 

“And so this little chain of events really was just the right timing, and that made us feel like we’ve got to go for it. 

… This space felt really right for me.”

What customers will find in the store is a small selection of casual clothes that combine function and style.

“I mean, I’m a mom of five. I live my life. I love to travel. I love to be at ball games. I love to look cute,” Williams said. “And the store ends up just being a reflection of my everyday life and my family’s life.”

Williams made it a point to say her store is not a boutique. That term is limiting, and her store will have “the freedom to carry whatever.”

And “whatever” is “just really wanting to represent everyday styles for everyday life, just what we’re wearing all the time, not just on special occasions or not just for events,” she said. “This is just for what we’re gonna go do life in all the time.”

She then listed the criteria for her to carry an article of clothing: “It’s got to be travel friendly and ball game friendly and washable and, you know, wearable and has to have multiple uses, multiple ways to wear, multiple ways to style.”

Because she keeps the inventory small, Williams also is rotating in new items frequently.

“We keep it limited enough that every two to three weeks, it’s gonna look hopefully like a new store,” she said. “I mean, every week or two, we’re getting new product.”