It’s our 19th birthday!
The Meadow is celebrating its 19th birthday, if you can call a shop a thing that is born. I went looking for low-cost building materials and found some old growth timbers in a giant disregarded pile behind the Rebuilding Center on Mississippi Avenue. I cleaned them up with wire brushes, cut them down to size, and began to build. I imagined something rustic and elegant, composed of the most ephemeral and beautiful things, and also enduring—intensely personal, neighborhood-y, and engaged. A shop celebrating the wonders of the great wide world.
The world seemed different back when we first opened our doors. Foot traffic was often slow, some might say desolate, but it never felt lonely. It simply felt late, or perhaps lazy—relaxed and unselfconsciously itself. In the afternoons, I would tack a sign on the door that said: “across the street having a beer” and rely on customers to saunter over and perhaps even join me. As far away as those memories are, I think things haven't changed that much. The world seems a little faster, a little wilder, but the time that lives in our memory often seems like an idyll, clarified and surrounded in stillness, in a way that the present often does not.
This stillness, the potency of a memory, is something that The Meadow strives to bring to life every day, like distilling something down to its bare essentials. The simple pleasure of strolling the streets of your town, the slight quickening of your pulse as you walk into a shop that promises discoveries and intrigue, the banter that builds to connection between a clerk or another visitor, and the treasure that you bring home. Perhaps it’s connected to a story, or an aspiration, or a yearning, or indeed, another memory—this is something we have always cared about, and over the years have learned to focus on more and more.
Our simple and yet impossibly ambitious vision is to make the world a more magical place. We do this for our customers, but we also do it for ourselves.
The birthday of a company is interesting because it allows us to think outside of ourselves. The Meadow, here on earth for 19 years now, is so much bigger than any one of us and depends on many other people—a remarkable feat of interconnectedness. We couldn't do any of this without our landlords championing our success, or our vendors being exceedingly kind and gracious, our employees believing in us and giving so generously of themselves, and of course, our customers, who have seen to it that we not just survive, but truly thrive.
Over the last 19 years, The Meadow has been part of the adventures, challenges, and successes of hundreds and hundreds of small independent makers. We have told the stories of thousands of products, each representing a unique moment of creative genius, crazy flavor combinations like lemon and black pepper in chocolate, or feats of selfless cultural preservation, like the reinvigoration of 1,000-year-old salt making tradition on the Noto peninsula of Japan. We have contributed to countless scores of community, national, and international organizations.
Opening our doors seven days a week, rain or shine, is a cadence we hope is both purposeful and modest, but most of all joyful. We hope to carry on for many years to come, continuing to make your day just a little bit brighter with our little shops, sprinkling magic wherever we go.
-Mark
