Today we’d like to introduce you to Melissa Kelenske.
Hi Melissa, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
We learned to knit where so much magic in this world begins–in a coffeeshop. I was home from college for summer break in between my sophomore and junior year, and a co-worker was knitting a sweater for her partner. I was mesmerized; Anna was the first person I had ever seen knit in real-time. She helped me make my first hat that summer and I’ve knit hundreds more since. I taught Liz to knit a few years later, mostly through oral guidance over our flip phones–this was, of course, several years before the introduction of FaceTime and YouTube. In the spring of 2006, the shop where we had been spending hours of our creative time went on the market, and without knowing any better, I bought it. For almost seven years, I ran the shop by myself–all of it. The face-to-face interactions, the ordering, the bookkeeping, the cleaning, the marketing, the planning–everything. And these were hard years. Recession years. Pre- e-commerce years. And at the end of those six years, I was just so tired. So disheartened. In May of 2012, I put the shop up for sale, and in September, I kept the shop open for long weekends and took another job as an office manager in Traverse City just to pay the bills. I was burning at both ends, pregnant with my first child when Liz, my sister, my rock, and one of the bravest people I’ve ever known, said she wanted in. She knew the struggles and she wanted to be a part of this place; regardless how much harder she knew we’d both have to work. I was terrified–we both were–but we decided with two of us, we could create much more than one person could alone. For five full years, she kept her full-time job–in the corporate office at Grand Traverse Pie Company–and worked on building the website and strategizing events at night and on the weekends while I kept the day-to-day operations at the shop afloat. A decade later and we are completely blown away at what this place has become. We sell yarn and tools for all the fiber arts (primarily focusing on knitting), as well as gift pairings we can’t seem to live without (enamel pins, tea, and candles, we’re looking at you!) And beyond just selling things, we hope we’ve done something more important–created a community.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not at all. I had no idea the great recession of 2008 was coming when I bought the shop in May of 2006. Of course, we could have never predicted Covid-19. But we’ve found that our greatest strength is being open and honest with each other AND our customers about Life’s struggles as they are happening to us and around us. We’ve learned to lean on each other and we cannot imagine life with a small business any other way.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We are connectors. We love to bring beautiful things to our customers, beautiful things that tell a story. Everything we carry in our shop is meaningful to us in some way, is connected to a real person with real feelings, is instrumental in someone else’s way of life.
Any big plans?
More of the same! More storytelling, more connection, more creation, and collaboration. And yes, we do have a very big, very secret plan to reveal soon; we will be putting our mark on another storied Leelanau landmark in early 2024.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.woolandhoney.com
- Instagram: woolandhoney
- Facebook: WoolandHoney
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpTW4Lkjvral63D_NALaPQ
Image Credits
Liz
Mae Stier
Melissa Kelenske
