Well. Let's be honest.

This is not a position many of us expected to be in during the first months of a brand new decade. And yet here we are, all of us feeling our way through this new reality, trying to keep our sanity intact and our businesses afloat. We’ll be blunt: we’re a family-owned retail business in the Age of Amazon. We have a real-life physical showroom in Montrose, CA, called Rugpublic — Business is always challenging for local shops like our, but, recently, well, you know. We're doing our best to focus on all the moments of growth and connection we get to experience, despite all the trouble out there.

We know this pandemic has hit everyone hard and in unique ways. For us, it's meant closing our Rugpublic storefront for the past two months, paying our staff for the first 6 weeks as they stayed safely home, and now taking as much work back into our hands as possible. We have a toddler who's been a real champ about this whole thing, but is definitely pushing our productivity skills to their limits.

But here's one thing we've really noticed during this experience — we're all connecting with our homes in new ways. Us included. Furniture has been rearranged, new plants acquired, incense burned, daily — just a renewed sense of how important our homes are to our senses of security and well being, especially for our kids.  So while we've been dragging our feet the last few weeks as we waited to see what a phased opening might look like, we've been figuring out how to best serve our customers during this crazy time, while keeping everyone safe.