Our chef, Tony Finnestad, fields questions from a reporter in the lead-up to our Traverse City store’s reopening.
It’s been boarded up for weeks and has been the scene of noisy, dusty construction work with a near-constant stream of contractors coming and going. But the day is finally here! The work is almost finished! Our fabulous, shiny, new Traverse City Embassy is ready to reopen its doors!
We’ll still be making some modifications to the store in the coming weeks, and we’ll be having a huge party to celebrate its “official” reopening in a few weeks time, but we are so excited we just had to open the doors now.
It was nine years ago when we started planning for a large flagship store similar to Glen Arbor. We’re can hardly believe that it’s finally here. It reopens tomorrow morning at 9am, but here’s a sneak peek behind the scenes now.
Remember this? This is what we started with in Traverse City. Its all cleared out here and ready for remodeling work to begin.
Remodeling work underway in our Traverse City store. It’s hard to believe in a few short weeks this building site will be open to the public!
The front of our store was all boarded up until last week. Now the boards are down, but we’ve papered over the windows until everything is ready.
Jason Homa, our VP of Sales, and Katy Grace, our Retail Marketing Coordinator, discussing the finer points of “Cherry Picking Ladder Placement” inside the new Traverse City Store.
Our chef, Tony Finnestad, fields questions from a reporter in the lead-up to our Traverse City store’s reopening.
Traverse City Store Manager, Dawn Gildersleeve, chats with Renee, our new cafe manager. Yep… our Traverse City store is getting its own cafe!
Amy Eaton, a Marketing Manager, tending to one of the millions of tiny details that go into reopening a retail store.
If the Traverse City store looks any good when it reopens (and it does!), we have these three ladies to thank in a big way. Katy, Kathy, and Joni have been working tirelessly to make it all happen so beautifully.
Stocking the shelves from scratch has been a major undertaking. And not one bag was accidentally opened and eaten. Nope. Not one. I swear.
Working at Cherry Republic is the pits… even when you’re the CEO!
The finished product! This is the view that will greet you when you enter our new Traverse City store.
All of us at Cherry Republic are extremely excited about the new Traverse City store. I’m extremely grateful to my wonderful staff, led by Jason Homa, who have worked so hard to turn this dream into a reality. I’m also very grateful to our friends at Great Lakes Bath & Body, who very kindly allowed us to take over some of the space in their wonderful store on Front Street while ours was closed.
We hope you’ll enjoy the new store when you’re next in town. Let us know what you think!
