Big changes, few details, lots of intrigue, SO much excitement, storewide discount, & moving to weekends (so we can make more good stuff happen…)

It’s been a while since we’ve reached out with an update about shop life, and we’ll be honest: even this message is only a teaser for what’s to come (with paperwork still pending, we’re doing our darndest to keep lips zipped, but we also have some changes rolling out that we want to share with you).

As most of you know, Junket has always been about connecting creativity + community through reuse, with a strategic intention to drive a reduction in demand for newly manufactured goods.

As this calendar year kicked off without a restaurant running next door, we found ourselves contending with a rather blank slate and a lot of ambiguity. Unexpected circumstances led us to spend time imagining how we might like to have the year play out, and to ponder how we might better expand on our mission to reduce demand for new manufacturing while we waited for our neighbors to get their thing going.

During the last couple of months (during which time you’ve not  heard as much from us as we’ve labored behind the scenes), we’ve plowed our way through more possibilities than we’d thought could exist, pondering circumstance and opportunity, tests and results and failures and discoveries, and all that we’ve learned in the last eight years (5+ at the shop).

Even more great options showed up courtesy of big thinking friends, often entering the picture with uncanny timing and nudging us to take these possibilities more seriously than we may have done otherwise.

In fact, we found some of these ideas so serious(ly intriguing!) that we chose to nurture them, all the while exploring how they might fit together and work well with our retail base of operations.

When choosing to undertake these sorts of serious(ly big!) ideas, one might find themselves led to other serious(ly momentous, unexpected) conclusions (this happened here, folks).

Perhaps the most startling conclusion we’ve reached? We’ve outgrown our home on 41^st & Minnehaha: the infrastructure development we want to pursue just can’t happen in a charming, yet unfinished, sometimes-leaky basement (if for no other reason than the sheer amount of labor involved in repeatedly hauling big things up and down old stairs).

As we get ready to leap (picture the steadying of stance, the determined setting of sights on adventures ahead…), we are committed to making sure that Junket’s enterprise systems are ready for growth.

Our board, our talented cohort of social enterprise vendors, and our current cast of misfits 😉 are on board with the direction we’re choosing to take.

Now, in order to focus our entire team’s energy and expertise on mission-critical, forward-moving functions, we’re choosing to redirect labor hours from the retail floor toward our desire to nurture more community, more creativity, and more reuse.

What does this mean?