If you’ve enjoyed live music around the Finger Lakes, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the blend of old and new jazz and swing stylings of The Cool Club and Lipker Sisters.
The eldest of the Lipker Sisters is Marilla Gonzalez. If you shop in downtown Geneva, you may have come across her store, Marilla’s Mindful Supplies, which encourages small steps to live a plastic free life with a variety of sustainable products.
Marilla’s Mindful Supplies opened in 2019 with an optimistic plan for future expansion. Just six months later the pandemic disrupted retail across New York. That wasn’t the only challenge the store faced.
“Every year there was something catastrophic that came up to distract from that.” says Gonzalez. “But, through that time, thankfully, with a very, very supportive community and friends and family, we continued to steadily get to a point in our business where it was looking more and more realistic.”
That’s Gonzalez speaking on a recent episode of her podcast Thank You for Understanding. Because, yes, in addition to gigging regularly with a popular band and owning a small business, she launched a new podcast about small business ownership with her friend and fellow downtown Geneva business owner Beth Haswell of Stomping Grounds. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I work on TYFU with Marilla and Beth.
In that recent episode, Marilla announced that Marilla’s Mindful Supplies is following its original plan and opening a new location at 661 South Avenue in Rochester’s South Wedge. The store’s grand opening is today at 11 o’clock, but it’s already meant changes for the way Gonzalez does business.
“If you just expand, expand, expand and you take it all on your shoulders and you take that weight entirely on yourself,” Gonzalez says, “I feel like it’s only going to become a burden. There’s no way you can sustain that as a person. So, that’s what keeps me striving to be better about delegation and to not micromanage and to trust my team and learn how to trust my team. Because, I want to be able to feel like this is good for me and it’s good for other people, but it’s not running me. I don’t know how I’m going to feel like, especially this first year setting it up and getting into the rhythm of the schedule. I have no idea. I’m probably going to be tired out of my mind. But, I know that my goal is to not take this whole Rochester expansion on my shoulders.”
Gonzalez already knows all too well that it doesn’t take long for the best laid plans to go awry.
“I mean the honest answer is, I have no idea what it’s going to be like,” Gonzalez says. “We’re just going to have to see what happens. But, since day one of starting our business, I wanted our business to be a blessing for us and not a burden. It’s not always that way. You can’t make it that way all the time. But, my goal at the end of the day is asking myself, is this a blessing to me or is this a burden?”
Marilla’s Mindful Supplies is on Exchange Street in downtown Geneva, on South Street in Rochester, and online at marillas.com. Upcoming dates for The Cool Club and The Lipker Sisters are on their Facebook page. The podcast, Thank You for Understanding, is at tyfupod.com.
