Michelle Ryerson calls her boutique in the Powerhouse Mall a “sparkle and bling store.” Hangers, racks and shelves brim with jewelry and headbands, hair clips, necklaces, scarves, shawls, handbags, earrings, bracelets, brooches, scrunchies and — for the past 11 months — face masks.
Thousands of masks in endless colors and patterns, many glittering with sequins, dazzling like a disco ball.
“I love sparkles. I love glitter,” Ryerson said last week standing in her store Jewelia, wearing a face mask flaked with (what else) sequins. Tiny diamond-like beads circled the eye frames of her glasses, too.
Now, after 30 years as a merchant in Powerhouse Mall — Ryerson owned two stores, a children’s boutique Little GabriAnnah and women’s boutique ElliStarr before opening Jewelia in 2006 — adorning and bejeweling countless Upper Valley women and girls with a fashion flourish, Ryerson is closing her shop.
“I turned 60 in November. I’ve spent half my life in this store. That’s a good run. It’s time to move on,” Ryerson said.
Jewelia’s closing is the latest retail vacancy to open up in Powerhouse Mall. Last year, both the Lindt Chocolate store and the olive oil condiments store InfuseMe closed. On Stage Dancewear on the mezzanine level closed a couple years ago, and the space remains vacant.
The decision to shutter her store when the lease expires in February was planned in the fall of 2019, Ryerson said, before the word COVID-19 entered the lexicon and closed the book for many small retail shops, which have been losing customers for years to big-box stores and the shift to online shopping.
Jewelia is the second-oldest store in Powerhouse Mall, outlasted only by women’s apparel store Clay’s.
“When I opened, there was no Kohl’s in West Lebanon, no T.J. Maxx, not even Walmart,” said Ryerson, who grew up in West Lebanon in a family with six siblings and remembers when Route 12A was “nothing but farms.”
The past year has seen a falloff in customers, of course, especially as weddings, once a reliable source of business, have been sharply curtailed and suspended because of the pandemic.
But her clientele’s demand for face masks, some of which as fashion accessories have sold for as much as $20, has been unexhausted, according to Ryerson (everything in the store is now 50% to 75% off).
“One month last summer I sold over 1,000 masks,” she said. “Customers would come in and buy 10, 12 at a time. I was reordering two to three times a week.”
But beyond face masks, and even before the pandemic, the retail climate got tougher and tougher in recent years.
“In the beginning, it was very lucrative,” Ryerson said. “In the 1990s, I could put anything on a rack and it would sell. But toward the end, not so much.”
Jewelia has been a family business. In addition to Ryerson’s daughters pitching in at the store when they were teens (they’re now grown and living near Boston), Ryerson also got help from her sister, Chrissy Bagley, who has worked there for 25 years.
Work and managing your own store can be a chore for many people, but Ryerson said it never felt that way for her.
“I never had a day where I didn’t want to come into work,” she said.
What does she like about it? “I love to sell. I love interacting with customers,” Ryerson explained.
There were times when she would get annoyed “but you can’t show it,” she said.
One thing that became increasingly aggravating in recent years — and other Upper Valley shopkeepers have attested to the same behavior — has been customers “coming in and thinking the store is a showroom. Seeing an item and then buying it online. I had a person do that with a handbag on their phone right in front of my face.
“Of course, you have to keep your mouth shut,” Ryerson said, bristling at the memory.
What’s next? She’s not sure. If an interesting sales job comes upl she could see doing that part time, although she acknowledged that it might take some getting used to after being her own boss for three decades.
Ryerson said she and her husband, Rich Ryerson, associate director of admission at Kimball Union Academy, would like to spend more time with their daughters in Massachusetts — one of whom is expecting the Ryersons’ first grandchild.
Whatever hasn’t sold when the store closes on Feb. 28 will be donated — face masks will go to schools or anyplace that needs them.
Thirty years is a long time to run a boutique, but Ryerson said there is another way to measure her longevity at Powerhouse Mall.
“I’ve seen a lot of maintenance guys come and go,” she laughed.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
