PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A Delaware County retail shop is celebrating two decades of business.
“When I started out, it was much different than the store is today,” said Anne Marie Hare, owner of Bunny Hares in Newtown Square, which sells jewelry, home goods, gifts and more.
Hare opened the shop in 2004 with a small loan of $20,000.
“Not enough to fill a store — that might’ve got me two displays full of stuff, and then mostly everything else on the credit card, so the first few years were, ‘Oh God am I gonna make this? I’ll be in debt,’” she said.
Hare not only made it through those first few years but also the online shopping boom and the COVID-19 lockdown.
Hare says she stayed in business during the pandemic by slashing prices and leaving orders in the trunk of her car for customers to pick up.
“And I’d lock the door behind me, put their names on bags and put it in the trunk of my car,” she said. “So they would drive up, grab what they wanted and leave. And that kind of kept me able to pay my rent.”
She says her shop provides things you don’t find online or at big box stores.
“We’ll walk people out to the car, we wrap stuff, we’ll help you out,” she said. “You can walk into a big department store or a big home improvement shop and you could have a 50-pound bag of mulch and nobody’s asking you if you need help getting it into the car if you need it but we will walk people to their car.”
Hare says inflation has made business tough in recent years, but she plans to keep it up as long as she is able.
“I love coming into work… I have not had a day where I said I don’t want to go in to work,” she said. “...And I still love it like it’s the first day I walked in the door.”