We're Opening a Shop in Riverside, Jacksonville, Florida: Not a Drill! Coming Shortly!

I'm opening a shop here in Riverside, Jacksonville, Florida! We'll be right next to the popular Kickbacks Gastropub on the corner King St and College St.

Quick cell phone shot of the "mini-shop" I opened in my apartment out of necessity! 

Body&Soul has been doing really well locally at markets and pop-up shops. It felt like every other visitor asked if we had a local shop and we were open to it if the right space popped up. The demand got to where I'd set up my apartment like a mini-store for customers to visit on an appointment-only basis and I was prepared to just live in my "store", ha!

The Body&Soul store and studio will host a wide variety of craft and holistic living classes. We'll teach how to make lotions, balms, salves, skin care products, aromatherapy, herbalism, and much more! We're also interested in giving back to the community so if there are any charities you know of that need help, let us know! Depending on the demand we're thinking of adding some raw vegan desert and cheese making classes to the mix too :) If you'd like to teach anything at the studio hit me up. If you have arts and crafts you sell (local and non-local) PLEASE do e-mail me because I may want to cary it in the shop. You know I live to support creativity and small business.

Loads of deals of Christmas presents will be there, or anytime-presents

We'll follow-up on the grand opening soon but expect some Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday Sales.

For just a little history with me and opening stores, I was going to open one five years ago. I got a check in the mail for $15,000 from a private investor (she's the mom of a friend I met from my old Resident Evil video game fansite from my teenage years, my life is weird!) and assembled a group of friends to open up our cafe/vintage shop but she ran into tax trouble and the check bounced. At the time I had enough money to do it on our own but the shop fizzled out. The rent in the areas I wanted to open in was sky high and I realized it wasn't what I wanted to do at all once I truly tried it on for size.

Now with this little shop I'm opening, it all feels right. I've always felt a strong calling to plants, all of my earliest blog posts were on my gardening trial and errors! And as I've shared in past posts, there's a strong history of herbal healing and gardening in my family, it was passed down from my mom's mom to her and then to me from Old World Mexico.

After studying herbalism and aromatherapy for two years and running a business selling healing products from another I've learned practically everyone is at least tired, stressed, or anxious. Those are the lucky ones. Many others have chronic pain. There's a strong movement towards finding holistic ways to treat these issues and take care of our daily personal care needs that aren't loaded with harmful chemicals. The goal for my shop is for it to be a place where you can learn everything about healing yourself from the inside-out, pick up products to help you do just that, and just unwind after work with fun craft and holistic care classes. If you're in the area, I hope you'll come by, there will have to be a special discount card or something for blog readers ;)

I'm thinkin' there will be a daily free tea of the day in our healing center :)

Our goal is to have our little be one where you can feel comfortable just coming to and having some tea after work, a calm healing respite. I'll share updates as they come, we're excited to get in there and get to work.

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