A new shop opened in a former realtor’s office in downtown Blue Hill this week.
Gingerfly Life, billed as “a store for the creative and curious,” is a new venture for former theme park designer Sarah Gibbon.
It’s another addition to downtown Blue Hill and aims to contribute to the community year-round, including with artistic offerings.
“I really want people to sort of feel like it’s a cabinet of curiosities that they can spend ages just looking around,” Gibbon said. “They don’t have to buy anything, just to come and be inspired and take the time to look.”
Her family has spent summers on the peninsula for decades, she said, and on a visit three years ago, she resolved to move if the chance ever arose.
After a career in theater and designing theme parks, most recently for Universal Studios, she had the chance to pursue another contract or come to Maine. She chose the latter.
Gibbon rented a place to live in the Stonington village of Oceanville last winter, where she joined the cribbage club and took an entrepreneurship class at the local adult education program that led to the idea of the mercantile.
“I thought, yes, this is my place,” she said. “This is where I want to be for the rest of my life.”
The shop space, tucked in the back of a professional building with a deck overlooking the local harbor, is the former office of the realtor Gibbon bought her house from. Local shop Bucklyn Coffee out front has been a driver of traffic to the store, and response overall has been “so wonderful,” she said.
Wares range from secondhand books to antique jewelry to tea to key chains to duck decoys to paintings to stationary supporting her love of physical mail. She’s also polling visitors to compile a list of things people wish they could buy locally that aren’t easy to find.
The goods are sourced from friends, local artists, English companies and Gibbon’s own collection. She had always hoped to have a store one day and purchased items on trips around the world, she said.
Gingerfly Life will evolve over time, but Gibbon aims to host art workshops and is considering starting an ‘arts club’ where people can use materials for a small fee.
Her original vision in that class was encouraging others to come to Maine for the restorative environment she experienced here, she said, possibly through retreats.
“But working with the folks who live on the island full time, it was like well, why don’t you think about people who actually live here first, Sarah, and then think about others afterwards?” she said. “… Really get to know your community.”
A mentor in the course advised her to live somewhere and see how the area speaks to her rather than coming in from away with a grand plan, she said, and the mercantile concept was born during a class brainstorming session.
Gibbon thinks of a mercantile as a source of things someone needs or might never think they’d need all in one place. The store was inspired by the general stores in Little House on the Prairie, one of the only television shows she saw growing up in South Africa.
“Gingerfly Life,” meanwhile, began as a made-up name with a friend. It came to represent what the state offered Gibbon when she first arrived, she said: a chance to appreciate her surroundings while really getting to know people and listen to them, compared to a corporate life rushing from meeting to meeting.
“So the gingerfly life is about taking a step back, but it’s still full of possibility,” she said. “… It’s almost like a dragonfly perching on a branch and then taking stock, and then it’s off to do something else.”
And, it turns out, opening a store isn’t that different from planning a theme park — it just happens at a smaller scale, with room for more of her own creativity.
“All my life I’ve been getting ready for a big opening and then it opens and the public comes in and then it’s kind of theirs,” she said, describing curating details and overdelivering on a concept. “So it’s been very similar with the shop.”
The store at 107 Main St. in Blue Hill is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.
