HUMBOLDT — Correina Shea called her newly opened second hand Main Street business “a little bit of everything.”
For sale are pieces of furniture, bags of toys, miniature car models, and consignment items like local honey, greeting cards, and art with donations accepted.
“I think the most important part in here is that everything is local. The artists are local that I’ve chosen, the people that hand make stuff are chosen,” Shea said. “I’ve made sure to include my community because that’s important.”
Shea said the store, which opened on Dec. 1, came about due to a conversation with a neighbour who had storage full of items from his job in property cleanup. Originally she offered to help him with posting sales to social media, but after learning both him and a colleague were looking to sell, the decision was made to open a small store.
The location at 537 Main Street, the former location of Komora, was chosen due to her landlord owning the space.
“It’s just me, I just run it myself, but they bring things and then I can sign them out, we have an arrangement,” Shea said. “It’s helping them out to not have it in their storage containers and houses.”
This isn’t Shea’s first business, with her also running Fairy Door Tours Saskatoon, a tour/scavenger hunt that involves wishmaking at a wishing tree, leave a note for the fairies at the fairy mailbox, and bundling – all with handmade pieces.
She said that while Fairy Door Tours is lots of fun, COVID-19 presented several challenges with a model where children and families would crowd close together around a tree. As a result, she began online college to study to be a paralegal, and then this opportunity appeared.
The name of the business was decided through a conversation with her husband, a multimedia graphic design instructor, in their living room.
“This opportunity came up and I’m here,” she said. “The idea of getting the money together to getting the building was probably two weeks.”
For the first week of Idea Treasures, Shea said business has been good, with the exception of a couple slow days.
Once she breaks even, she said her goal is to donate a certain percentage of the profits to the reading program at Humboldt Public School.
“It’s new and used, I wash everything, I clean everything, I try to take care of the things that are here – I try to find good stuff.”
