Dan and Amy Kelly were tired of sitting on the couch.
At least, that’s how Dan describes it.
The husband and wife — he a pilot for American Airlines and she a retail veteran — were laying low during the pandemic earlier this year, until they realized they wanted to move forward with an idea they had for a store.
“We were sitting on the couch and decided we had enough of that,” Kelly said.
So in August, the Kellys moved forward with an “aggressive build-out” schedule that saw the duo transforming a previously unoccupied space located off an alley in the popular Southlake shopping center Park Village.
The result is Spruce Home + Closet, with 2,000 square feet of gifts, home goods, clothing and more. The store opened fortuitously on Nov. 28: Small Business Saturday.
“The idea behind the store is, you can spruce up your home or your closet,” Kelly said. The store will follow retail’s seasonal bent, adding new items quite often. “Hopefully, it is always a unique experience.”
Already, the Kellys have found that they are complementing one another with the venture. A Stanford Business School graduate who served in the military and also started a software company, Dan said he has enjoyed negotiating the lease and other aspects of launching the business, while Amy is the store’s buyer and knows the ins and outs of Spruce’s wide-ranging inventory, which spans clothes, home decor and even baby products and travel items.
Already, Kelly said they’ve had at least one repeat customer inside of a week — a good sign for success.
“Yes, there’s a lot of turmoil in the world the last several months,” he said. “But Southlake is as recession-proof as you can get. We’re excited about the concept. A customer told us, ‘If you can make it now, you can make it any time.’ And we just didn’t want to wait any longer.”
