Photos © 2010Curly Girl Design, Inc./Leigh Standley. all rights reserved.
For those of you who have had the great pleasure of meeting me, you already know: I’m not…girly, per se. I wear a lot of black. My normal outfit includes skinny jeans (dark), boots (dark, with hardware), and some sort of billowy, body-morphing, nearly-making-me-unrecognizable-as-a-human, shirt. For the first year of my being back at Marmalade (after a short stint away) I had a fauxhawk. And terrifyingly, at our first Halloween party ever, early this October – I dressed in my finest “Seattle 1994” outfit, complete with smudged eyeliner, dramatically messy hair, flannel and a babydoll dress.
And customers didn’t realize I was in costume. Oy.
Which is why I need Marmalade in my life.
I mean, c’mon. The walls are, like, neon red and orange! There are chandeliers hanging above my head at the front counter! There are candles, perfumes, fancy papers – frankly, there is just about everything here – and it gives me that burst of ‘lady-ness’ that I reject in my normal daily life. Marmalade is more than just a shop, it’s like a lifestyle choice.
“Live like a Marmalade girl” I tell myself while trying to find something to wear at work that would be even a fraction as cute as what Leigh rolls out of bed in. “What would Marmalade do?” I say when dealing with particularly relentless delivery people or cold calls from some phone company. And while you read this you may think, well, what the heck IS a Marmalade girl, and what DOES she do?! The answer, after so many years being here, appallingly simple:
She’s You!
And me! I didn’t need to horde half a dozen Pumpkin candles on my mantle at home to be a Marmalade girl (though, I would do it no matter what – holy moly is that candle amazing)! I didn’t need to buy the vintage wall art (the second I opened the box when it came to the shop) to be more like Marmalade, and I didn’t need to sport the unbelievable scent that is “paper and cotton” to be what Marmalade needed me to be. I already was! I like to think that just as I need Marmalade in my life to give me that girly-street-cred, maybe Marmalade needed me and my edge just as much.
So here’s to celebrating the wide range of Marmalade-ettes that support my second home, and Leigh’s pride and joy. To the whacky artists that will talk with me about Rococo pattern work! The shy women who prefer not to chit chat and I desperately try to oblige! To the kids that come in after school and fill me in on the latest gossip! To my chatty-Cathy’s that visit me just to talk about the weather, the Olympics or what was on tv last night! To the business women who zoom in and out, on a mission, and say ‘thank you!’ while flying out the door! I salute you!
Note: Our website for the shop is still under construction and will hopefully be functioning in mere days. Until then, if you have questions about any of the products featured in these posts contact Lauren at: lauren@shopmarmalade.com
Lauren is our superior shop manager at Marmalade, but she is also an art and pop-culture critic at large currently putting the finishing touches on her Masters of Arts Administration from SCAD. To hear more from her check out her blog: http://www.junkyardarts.com
