By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Customers of the retail institution Calico, Sage & Thyme will have plenty to celebrate in April.
They’ll be able to wish proprietor Barbara Rothrock a happy retirement after 41 years operating the store. And they’ll enjoy a sale marking her retirement.
Customers will also be able to welcome a new owner for the shop, Lisa Palmer, who is buying the business. The business, on the corner of South Main and Clay streets in downtown Bowling Green, had been slated to close when Rothrock’s previous efforts to find a buyer fell through.
Palmer will take over as of April 29. She said she plans both to maintain the venerable business’ character, and add her own touches, including selling more arts and crafts on consignment.
“I want to leave as much the same as possible,” Palmer said. “She has such a great following for the cards, children’s books, jewelry, teas and spices. All of that I plan to keep.”
Palmer has been considering opening a shop for a couple years, and when she found that Calico, Sage & Thyme was still for sale, she decided to make an offer.
She has worked in her husband’s business, Jim Palmer Excavating. Her only experience in retail goes back to working at Kmart when she was in high school.
That’s no deterrent to success. All she has to do is look to Rothrock. She had little retail experience when she opened the shop in 1975.
It grew from her love of herbs and necessity. She was a secondary school teacher when she moved to Bowling Green with her family. The State of Ohio would not recognize her Wisconsin teaching credentials. Faced with returning to school, she headed in a new direction.
Back in Kansas where she earned her master’s degree in American diplomatic history, she’d maintained an herb garden. “I’ve always liked to cook.”
In Northwest Ohio, she got involved in the fledgling Maumee Valley Herb Society, and grew herbs at her home on Buttonwood Avenue. She even started selling some. She also made herb blends, tea and potpourris. She sold those during sidewalk sales in downtown, and she and some friends held a Christmas bazaar for two weeks in a former church building on Church Street.
All this proved valuable market research. “It gave us an idea of what would sell,” she said, “because that was the core of the business.”
She had the help of a number of friends, her neighbor and Wilma Paulvir, who worked at the shop for 25 years, and Sue Clark, Sue Crawford and Sue Pugh. It was Clark’s husband, Bob, who suggested the “calico,” be part of the name.
During the height of celebrations of the nation’s Bicentennial, there was demand for the traditional cloth, Rothrock said. She sold clothing made from calico as well as calico by the yard. Calico, Sage & Thyme, was just close enough to evoke the name of the Simon and Garfunkel hit song.
While she had much help, Rothrock said, she always operated as a sole proprietorship. The skills she needed as a teacher served her well as a business owner: good organization, planning, and record keeping. “I don’t do lesson planning anymore, but I sure block out what we’re going to do for the next few months.”
While her interests have shaped the store, she’s always inquiring about what customers would like to see. She keeps a list in the backroom with potential items. “We wouldn’t have survived if it was just my interests.”
Still, the herbs and greeting cards have been standbys. When it appeared she would close the business, those were the two items in a particular that customers worried about finding elsewhere. Card shops, she said, once plentiful, are an endangered retail species. She now has people coming from Sylvania and Findlay to stock up on cards.
She got into books from the beginning, starting with books on growing herbs. “That’s how people learned things back then,” Rothrock said.
She also expanded early on to carrying a selection of high quality children’s books. She relies on the list of American Library Association award winners and the staff at the Wood County Public Library to keep her apprised of what to stock.
The advent of the Food Network, which awakened an interest in cooking, has been a boon both for the herbs and cookware and cookbooks.
Those core items have helped sustain the shop. Someone may stop in to buy a card and end up buying a candle.
Calico, Sage & Thyme has felt the effects of national downturns. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, “my sales plummeted. People stopped spending money for a couple of months.” She had bounced back when the recession hit in 2008. Sales dropped 30 percent, and Rothrock scaled back, giving up the front part of the store, and making the main entry off Clay Street.
Rothrock understands that “we don’t sell anything you need to buy.” Then she adds: “Life would be very unpleasant for me without tea.”
Under Palmer’s proprietorship, she’ll still be able to buy it at the shop.
Palmer said among the consignment items she plans to sell are candles from 1812 Candle Shoppe, paper flowers and crochet items for babies.
Those will fit well into the mix of items now in the shop, she said, and keep Calico, Sage & Thyme a place where customers can find things they can’t anywhere else in Bowling Green.
