Mariposa delights in success of new store

MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SEA, Mass. — After 40 years in the tabletop wholesale business, Mariposa President Livia Cowan considered herself well-versed in the needs of her retail partners.

But as a newly minted retailer, she now has an even better understanding of those needs.

Cowan was inspired to try her hand at retail after attending a Fenimore Lane Design Summit in Connecticut last summer where Mariposa was one of a few dozen brands invited to set up an under-the-tent pop-up product display. It got Cowan and her team thinking.

“We’ve got this beautiful barn north of Manchester [Mass.]. It’s got that New England charm,” Cowan said. The barn serves as Mariposa’s main office. It has a downstairs area that it typically used for storage, but during COVID they decided to turn it into a showroom for buyers to see its merchandised product displays.

“We had that for a few years,” said Cowan, “and people keep coming up to us and asking, ‘Can we buy?’

So, it acquired complementary tabletop products from fellow vendors like Vietri and Caspari, and added a few ancillary items like stuffed animals and cookbooks. Mariposa & Friends opened for business just before Thanksgiving.

Pulling together a compelling assortment for consumers is what her longtime retail partners do all the time, Cowan noted. Those responsibilities were accentuated at last month’s Atlanta Market, where Cowan slipped away from her own showroom from time to time to visit others in the business with a retail buyer’s mindset.

“I’ve never been a buyer before. I learned so much from being on the other side,” she said. “It’s a different angle to the business which I’ve never done.”

Vice President of Sales Carter Everitt agreed. “It’s one thing to visit your accounts from time to time, but it’s different when you live and breathe it,” she said.

The store had a great Christmas, according to Cowan. Things are a bit quieter now, and Cowan is busy lining up a wine tasting, an event with the nearby J. McLaughlin clothing store — which shares a similar demographic — and a demonstration with a British artist who creates handcrafted fabrics.

In the meantime, Cowan is using her new store as a testing ground for new Mariposa products. For example, she merchandised Mariposa’s new collection of Color Theory photo frames, which are handcrafted and made from recycled paper, in the store and took pictures of the display to send to her sales reps, to help explain her vision for the line and how it can be merchandised at retail.