![]() ![]() So I posted a whole bunch of pictures and I was like, if you pay the $5 shipping, I’ll get this right out to you.” She laughs as she recalls, “I didn’t know what was going to happen. We had a lot of great, small illustrators that had licensed their art to different puzzle companies. I started by taking pictures of all the puzzles we had. “All of a sudden, the whole town shut down, and I just decided to go into the shop by myself. All that changed with the coming of COVID-19. What was it like to be a self-proclaimed type B business owner in that most challenging year for all businesses, 2020? Judd-McGee’s sister had set up Swallowfield’s website the year before, but most sales still happened through the physical shop. I’m type B, so it’s very much how I want to operate.” “We pretty much exist in parallel ways where we try to really support each other. They really helped me get Swallowfield going.” Rather than seeing her new little shop as a competitor, she says, they felt like collaborators. “Spruce and Gussy in Bar Harbor had been showing a lot of my art and selling prints of it. “I felt really certain of what kinds of things I’d like to have in the store.” Almost immediately, she found a supportive artistic and retail community on MDI. “I had met so many cool people doing what I had been doing at craft shows and galleries,” she continues. The store was a natural extension of that work,” she says. “I was working for myself as a freelance designer and artist. ![]() When they moved to Northeast Harbor, plans for a storefront to sell art (and maybe a few other things) began to take shape in her mind. He got the first job he applied for.” It was a great move for their family-“the school in Northeast Harbor is so wonderful,” she enthuses-as well as for Judd-McGee herself, whose art, originally a stress-relieving outlet from her day job at Planned Parenthood, had begun to sell briskly on Etsy. But when the kids were getting close to middle school age, my husband was looking for a new job, and on a whim, he applied up here. His mom had left us a small house, and we had been renting it out to pay the taxes every year, just coming up for a couple of weeks in the summer. An acclaimed artist herself, Judd-McGee has filled shelves, display cases, and the walls from floor to ceiling with art, home goods, and accessories.Īlthough they had started their family in Portland, Judd-McGee says, “My husband and I both grew up on Mount Desert Island. In a small white clapboard building on the edge of downtown Northeast Harbor, Jennifer Judd-McGee has packed her shop Swallowfield to the rafters, literally.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |