How an idea became reality

On the 6th of October last year the owner of the garden center I used to work at agreed to rent us some space in one of his barns, which is when things got real and we had a goal to work towards. 

We'd open the shop in the spring.

We had half a barn, but no door, and no wall to divide the garden center's storage space and what would be our store.

We had a lot of product ideas but no name, no real concept, and basically no clue :)

Super excited, Lotta and I met in Stockholm for our first official business meeting about a week later, drank loads of tea, coined a name, made huge to-do lists, drew plans ... and then life got in between until we met again in November.

Then, our logo, website, Facebook page and Instagram were created ... and life got in between again.

I like to think we've been super busy, actively planning and working on this business idea the whole winter, but in practice we procrastinated a whole lot when it came to searching for products and distributors and most of the "planning" actually happened during conversations with friends and family (and even complete strangers!) and time flew by nerve-rackingly quickly!

Originally we thought we'd start off with a little event with cookies and coffee inside one of the greenhouses at the garden center to offer a sneak peak to the people we knew and present a selection of our products to whoever was interested, but then, suddenly things started happening!

We got a door, a wall, shelves, made signs, started ordering our carefully selected products, printed postcards, posters & tote bags, baked cookies, invited our friends over for a cookie tasting, baked more cookies, and were generally feeling pretty good about things. 

Despite the fact that we definitely could have planned and procrastinated some more, we decided to put our motto to the test.

Why not today? Or rather, why not the 2nd of April?

We sent press releases to the local newspapers, prepared celebratory champagne, brewed loads of coffee to go with our cookies and hoped a lot of people would show up for our very first opening day!

Lifestyle changes

Last September me and my friend Lotta started brainstorming about how we could create for ourselves the lives we really wanted.
It's been clear since we met in 2010 that this would involve starting our own business ... so that's what we did.
On the 2nd of April, after months of dreaming, imagining, thinking, planning, ordering, organising, and quite a few freak-out moments we opened our lifestyle store called "Varför inte idag?" - Swedish for "Why not today?"

A name that became our motto, a daily reminder, and now also the name of my blog which till this day was called "Sustainability" a term that has become so vague over the years that it was time for an update.

Why not today?