An End, and a Beginning

The Boerne Emporium was a there story multi-vendor shop in the heart of The Hill Country Mile in Boerne, Texas. The location was phenomenal, but downtown Boerne has been known, until recently, for the antique shops, and the boutiques. This has been the story for The Hill Country Mile since before I can remember, and I moved to Boerne, for the first time, in 1993. Of course being a kid or a teenager in Boerne in the mid too late 90's wasn't exceptional. In fact, it was downright boring, at the time the only thing that I could appreciate along Main Street, and especially along The Hill Country Mile, was The Bear Moon Bakery, and that was, you know, a bakery, and a coffeehouse, and I likely enjoyed going there only because I wasn't the typical small town teenage boy, and neither were my friends. 

Boerne, Texas has too many boutique, and antique shops, simply because Boerne lacks an identity, as a town, and for decades made-do by following the path of slightly larger, and more well-known, German town, about an hour away, Fredricksburg. Which not only had the identity of being an antique town, but it served them too, even still. 

Boerne, not so much. And now it's changing, and growing too quickly to keep up, our identity remains with our public schools, which isn't going to work anymore. 

As a result, The Boerne Emporium was closed, and the building was sold. And Wardrobe Books, my beta bookstore was no more, at least physically. We (I) still maintained an online presence, but that too started changing because Abebooks was no longer working for me as a eCommerce platform.

It seemed as if everything I had built was disappearing. 

And it might have, entirely, if I didn't realize that it was only because, until now, I wasn't willing to change, or rather, that I didn't realize, practically, that I needed to. I had not tweaked anything, I just opened the doors, and said "Come." And this was the same mistake that Read All About It made, and apparently, some other independently owned bookstore that I've heard rumors about, which had both opened, and closed their doors while I was living on the distant shores of elsewhere. 

Unforeseen changes, and failure, if approached a certain way, lead to the best lessons, and improvements in your business, and they have for me, both in my personal life, and for CommuniTea Books. 

The closing of Wardrobe Books, and the changes that I would have to make with the website, led to a conversation that I had with a handful of people, and this conversation led me into a new chapter, and through the front doors of a bank that, through their rejection, inspired avenues that I would have never imagined existed, let alone considered...