On a recent afternoon at Hearth & Soul, Busch-Transou buzzed from room to room, inviting customers to linger a little longer. Reverend Paretti suggested that a storefront could be in Busch-Transou’s future, a big idea that combined all the things that fed her soul. When she asked Busch-Transou, “What feeds your soul?,” the beer chief dwelled on the question, ultimately determining that what mattered to her most was family, home, friends, and connecting people to help them solve problems and uncover opportunities. As part of the festivities, the Reverend Catherine Paretti provided life-coaching sessions to attendees. The impetus for Hearth & Soul came about when Busch-Transou and other guests were invited for a celebratory girls’ weekend at a friend’s Georgia plantation. True to its gathering ethos, Hearth & Soul then hosts a get-together for the organization on the shop’s premises. In the spirit of altruism, Hearth & Soul sponsors a non-profit each month by selling candles (symbolically “shining a light”) and donating the net profit proceeds to a chosen cause. She frequently hosts gatherings at night too. And Busch-Transou doesn’t simply shutter the store’s doors at the end of the day. Inside the space, garden and book clubs meet, philanthropies circle up, brainstorming runs wild. on weekdays, it’s an inviting spot for coffee in lieu of the routine Starbucks. Of course, plenty of locals are glad for the instant gratification that comes with having high-end offerings at the ready, but Hearth & Soul fills many community voids beyond retail. In the beer business we say, ‘Making friends is our business.’ It’s the same here.” “We’ve taken the same principles of hospitality and applied them to retail. “We want people to gather here,” says Busch-Transou, who holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and has spent most of her career in hospitality. The welcoming double-doors of Hearth & Soul in Tallahassee (photo by Eliza Schneider-Green) Outside on the patio (yep, there’s an outdoor space too), Palecek furniture is clustered around fire pits, which get moved aside to make room for yoga and Pilates classes. There are shelves of fine larder products, like Kentuckyaki (a teriyaki sauce infused with bourbon) and Squirrel Brand nuts a mudroom with yarn-wrapped balls for pups a dining room with coffee service both an enviable women’s closet and men’s closet stocked with seasonal must-wears by top contemporary labels like Vince, Chan Luu and True Grit.īack near the fitting rooms, plush towels and luxurious pillow-tops fill out a bed and bath section. Opposite the living room, an open kitchen space with a vast quartz-top island serves as the gathering point for tastings and cooking demos. The light-filled foyer gives way to a living room equipped with comfy sofas, cowhide rugs and a fireplace. Although the storefront might appear along a hodgepodge of strip mall facades in a winding complex, its alluring entryway, clad in sleek wood and flanked by glowing gas lanterns, hints that this space bucks the traditions of most Tallahassee boutiques.Įven to call Hearth & Soul a mere “shop” undercuts its innovative layout, loosely arranged like a house, each room fully outfitted with buyable merchandise. Hearth & Soul, a fresh retail concept, was launched in September 2015. A photo by Gina Weaver hangs in the background. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.Susie Busch-Transou stands in the kitchen at Hearth & Soul. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file. This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it.
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