Shop owner turns dream into business

For years Jennifer Rea had envisioned herself one day becoming a shopkeeper, perhaps after retirement, tending to business and sweeping the sidewalk when time allowed.

That dream just happened to come 30 years earlier than she expected.

At 28, Jennifer is the proud owner, manager and everything else that her new home décor and bath and body business, Daisy J’s, entails. The rustic boutique-themed, 1,100-square-foot shop is next to Kootenai Coffee on North Government Way in Coeur d’Alene.

For the past several weeks since Daisy J’s first opened, Rea has amassed an inventory of hand-picked products, customer-requested items and unique gifts within her butter-cream colored shop. Her personal touches are on display throughout, including four wooden chairs placed in picture frames that hang as a sort of 3-D art series. Her inventory, which varies from rustic furniture to specialty lotions, creams and themed bars of soap, has been shaped through customer requests and through the six years Rea spent in other trades prior to Daisy J’s.

A graduate of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Rea received a degree in hotel and restaurant management, which she put to use as a manager at different spas in Arizona and Idaho in the past six years. While at the spas, she learned the ins and outs of business, such as staff management and maintaining supplies and also how to keep customers – the life blood of almost any business – happy.

“It was such great experience learning the inventory and merchandising side of business,” she explained, adding that it also gave her insight into some products that she knew she eventually would want to carry in her own business.

Though Rea’s business is new, almost everything else about it is almost a decade old. For example, when she was 19, the name Daisy J’s had already been cemented in the future entrepreneur’s mind, as had the shape of the boutique’s oval, wooden sign that now is above the shop’s entrance.

Even Daisy J’s oval business cards, which feature a personalized twist on the how-to instructions for growing Gerbera daisies, Rea’s favorite, had been thought out.

“Happiest in the shade, likes to be sung to, not as fragile as she seems. Petal pushing at Daisy J’s,” the back of the card reads.

“There are a lot of reflections of my house in here,” Rea said.

The personal touches and decorative flare that mark the shop have been evident in Rea’s life from early on, said Tina Rea, Jennifer’s mother and chief financial officer at a nonprofit business in Moscow.

“She has always been really, really good at decorating,” Tina Rea said. “She’s just very gifted at decorating a house.”

Though the proverbial ball for Daisy J’s may have started as a snowflake, once set in motion, the idea became a full-blown blizzard by the time Jennifer Rea’s last job came to an end when her employer’s business was sold.

It became apparent after that that maybe she should open her own business, Rea recalled.

With financial advice and physical help from her mom and dad, Ron – the “sweat equity” of the business, according to Rea, as he helped move the heavier products and get the business ready to open – she dusted off an old business plan from college and signed the lease for her new digs. Her mom, who is also her best customer, “demanded a spreadsheet” about the business, Rea said, and helped her narrow down what sort of entity the shop would be as the business plan came into focus. With the plan complete, Rea applied for and received a small-business loan, then started to put all the pieces to Daisy J’s together.

“You can do all the research you want, but it’s always an educated guess,” she said about the planning stages. As a Clarkston, native, Coeur d’Alene was always an area that Rea had in mind for her business. “I just figured that there was a need for a shop (like Daisy J’s) … I’ve gotten a great response from people.”

In the two and a half months since her doors opened, Rea has seen her share of highs and lows. Advertising is always a challenge for a new business. “It is all about word-of-mouth,” she said.

Some of the highs have been a rush of business in the weeks running up to the holidays.

Instead of lows, it would have to be changed to lonely, as Rea is the sole employee of the business. That’s a new development, where as at her previous jobs she was used to managing a staff, which at one point numbered 37 employees.

But being the boss has its advantages, too.

“The coolest part is actually writing my paycheck, signing the check and then signing it as yours,” Rea said. Also, if she wants to change something in the store, “I don’t have to clear it with people first,” she added.

As for her neighbors, customers should feel safe and secure about spending their money at Daisy J’s because the police are just across the street.

And what about future plans for the business?

“I want to have a staff, I want to have employees,” she said.

But for now Rea is enjoying meeting her customers, where the shop’s smaller atmosphere allows more friendly exchanges, she said. “I have the best conversations with people.”