Scrapbookers who want to shop at a store that caters exclusively to their craft will have to go to Pine City, Minn., or Minneapolis starting Oct. 1.
True Colors Scrapbooking and Gifts in Kenwood Plaza is closing its doors after 18 years, three locations and countless memories preserved in scrapbooks, memory boxes and photo cards.
The store was busy on Wednesday afternoon with shoppers eager to take advantage of store-closing prices that have been in effect since the beginning of September. Barb Cadigan and Jan Wagner were among them, but not just for sale prices. They shop at True Colors every Wednesday afternoon.
Nothing will replace True Colors for the local residents, at least in terms of convenience. The scrapbooking store in Pine City is the nearest comparable option. Wagner said she sometimes goes to Bargain Bill's in Rice Lake, Wis., which isn't exclusively a scrapbooking store but has a "huge amount of scrapbooking."
"But sometimes Bargain Bill's stuff costs more than here," Cadigan added.
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There still are local options, such as the Michael's craft store, Cadigan said, "but a lot of us don't go to Michael's because it's so much of a chain store."
There's also the option of shopping from the comfort of home.
"Do you shop on the Internet a lot?" Cadigan asked Wagner. "I don't."
But a lot of people do, and a lot of people go to big-box discount stores, said True Colors owner Carla Preston, 48, whose 18-year-old daughter hadn't been born yet when she opened the original True Colors in Canal Park. The consumer's choice to bypass local, independent stores like hers is the primary reason she is going out of business, Preston said.
"You're devaluing your own neighborhood by not shopping your local (stores)," Preston said. "I'm not saying boycott Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart. Just give your local businesses a thought. It doesn't take much to keep them in business. If you go in there every other week and spend a few dollars, if everybody did that, it would keep those local businesses open."
The weak economy has put many independent stores on the brink, Preston said. For her, the danger signs were in place last year when the store only broke even. This year began the same way. Preston was able to pay her seven part-time employees but had to forego her own paycheck.
The store lost $10,000 in July and $14,000 in August, and the store's lease was due to run out Oct. 1. "I said, 'That's it,' " Preston said. "The only reason we could have stayed open was to have customers commit to shop the store."
It turned out the way to make that happen was to announce the store was closing. Business has been 10 times greater this month. Half the store's inventory was sold in the first 10 days, and the store would be empty now if back orders from suppliers hadn't come in, Preston said.
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That response demonstrates that interest in scrapbooking and paper crafts hasn't waned, Preston said.
Cadigan agreed. "I think there's just a whole bunch of women that are looking for one thing, and scrapbooking and paper crafts is that one thing," she said.
Mary Jane Paciotti, 65, a retired teacher who has worked part time at the store for almost five years, agreed that scrapbooking is as popular as ever, but said the economy may have forced some hobbyists to limit their purchases. "This is an extra," she said. "It's: Should I buy a loaf of bread or stickers? And sometimes I'd rather go for the stickers," she added with a smile.
Cadigan, 60, who has shopped at True Colors since the Canal Park days, was so saddened by the news of its closing that she bought the staff a dozen red roses and included her favorite verse, "Nothing is worth more than this day," by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. She stamped the verse on paper.
She bought the paper, and originally came across the verse, at True Colors.
