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...or how a city girl fell in love...
Jann Stefoff has been an entrepreneur all her life, largely due to a boss early in her career telling her that she was unemployable, and suggested being her own boss was the only solution.
Point taken.
“We thought we'd last 2 - 3 years max” says Jann. Bibelot was initially meant to be full-time for her Mom, part-time for her, as she was still casting television commercials in Toronto. Full-time.
“We were running all over Ontario, going to auctions in muddy farmers fields, feeling horrible for poring through someone's life but always on the lookout for some piece of wonderfulness.”
But there were some other elements that were surfacing – Jann had grown weary of the television world, and her beloved city was changing fast. Opening the shop in Port Hope with her mother looked like it might be a slow exit strategy from both.
“...because my entire work background was kind of eclectic. What marketable skills can one attribute to a casting director? Or a modelling agent? A chubby model? Fashion photographer? And before doing all that, I'd been in retail. Happily so too, I might add.”
“Sometimes, just because it comes easily doesn't mean you should poo-poo it.
I wanted to be all kinds of things – a writer, an artist, a singer, a comic – but retail seems to have been the most natural fit for me and answers a lot of those things.”
“That said, I still write And laugh.”
Jann lost her Mom and partner a few years ago, and moving forward was a challenge that continues to this day.
“I tried to divorce Mom by about the 3rd year of working together...and she tried to push me out of a moving car in New Hampshire”...two bull-headed strong women in a 400 square foot space is challenging to say the least.
“...but there isn't one decision that I make that I don't consider her input – even if it means I ignore it!”
Jann has had the enormous good fortune to travel a little, work with and meet amazing, fascinating and talented people, experience things that many others don't – and she is well aware of how that impacts her taste, her pursuits, the finds she shares with clients.
There isn't any possible way to separate her shop from her self. “I always prepare myself to buy anything that doesn't sell in the shop – it's a rule we made when we were buying antiques so my shop buying is all about what I'd live with myself.”
Luckily, so far, so good.
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