QUEENSTOWN — Building on her eight-plus years of retail experience as owner of the unique gift and upcycled vintage furniture store, Bee Crafty Collectibles on High Street in Chestertown, Helen Cowley has expanded her enterprise to include a second location on the high-profile Outlet Center Drive of Queenstown Premium Outlets in Queenstown.
The well-crafted Bee Crafty Collectibles sign created by her husband’s enterprise, Bee Crafty Metals, was affixed atop Cowley’s suite number 17 in early August in anticipation of the soft opening which occurred on Aug. 8.
Cowley said she had been thinking of a second location for a relatively short time before choosing to move forward.
“Well, I thought about it last year and [then] dismissed it. And then, I thought about it again, just this past May and poof, here I am.”
For the last two months, Cowley has been a merchandising machine ordering and then working to fit out the 3,000 square-foot retail space, that she feels will give her core customers more opportunities to find more of the goods and products they already love from her Chestertown location, plus some new lines of goods and apparel.
“When I looked at the space, I thought, well, this is really big, but then it just kind of clicked. I wanted it to be ‘bridge to beach,’” she said, in reference to the distance between the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the famous Maryland and Delaware beaches so often traveled by Mid-Atlantic vacationers.
“So, in the middle of the bridge and the beach is Bee Crafty Collectibles, and I’m going to provide whatever the clientele needs, like kitchen wares, clothes, gifts, purses, and socks, and many of the same things I have in Chestertown. I just try to provide my customers with what I think they’ll need, so they don’t have to go to a big box store.”
Her signature product line from Maryland-centric Route One Apparel has been wildly popular in Chestertown, so she is expanding that at the Outlet to be able to fulfill the demand of the growing, tourist-based customer profile in Queenstown.
Some new merchandise that she is proud to be stocking is the Happy Crates line of apparel and festive crates. Filling the crates with fun activities for kids with cancer has been the mission of another local business — Happy Crates — since its inception in 2009, in the hope of putting smiles on the faces of these courageous kids and their families. Ten percent of the sale of every Happy Crates item returns to the organization to help support the mission.
And in the fall, Cowley said, customers will discover that Bee Crafty Collectibles is the place to be for your Baltimore Ravens sweatshirts and gear. Right now, the store is stocked with back-to-school essential backpacks, Foozy socks, and Cowley’s other new line of “Swifty” merchandise that no true Taylor Swift fan can live without.
Thoughts of the grand opening a few weeks ago brought a tear, she said, of gratitude to her eye for all of her Chestertown customers who took the time to support her over those first few days.
“I am really trying to make it into an extraordinary gift store just like Chestertown is. I mean, it is extraordinary, and this is going to make me cry. In fact, the first weekend I had more Chestertown people in here than anyone else.”
Cowley sees both her enterprises as an extension of her own family and that’s how she wants customers to feel.
“I want them to have the same experience that you have in Chestertown. You come in, you look around, you might not see it today, but if you come back next week, you never know what you’re going to find.”
And for anyone who may be wondering about the future of her store in Kent County, Cowley simply replied, “I am not leaving Chestertown in any way.”
Store hours for the Queenstown location follow regular outlet mall hours; Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
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