Story and video produced by Haley Mashburn and Hannah Lindsey, shot on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.
Next time you ever wind up in Mabank Texas, you need to go to Market Street NEST. Walking into a boutique, you expect to find vintage things, maybe a cool ring or two, but how many small-town boutiques do you walk into where they greet you at the door, and make you feel comfortable? What about a play house in the store that your kids can play in? Not too many, but Julie and Randy Squibb have completely changed the game!It all started with Julie and Randy dreaming of having a small store that had hard to find items that you might have to drive to Dallas to find, but instead, having them in downtown Mabank, as well as it being a fun place to be. Julie and Randy both had owned their own businesses in Dallas for years, but Julie just didn’t have the nerve to open a store when they lived in Dallas. When the building became available, Randy said “Julie, we can buy this building, but what would we do with it?” without even thinking, Julie says “We are going to open a store. Done, we are doing it!” and they did! They started construction right away. It would take only three months to get the store up and running. “Before we knew it, it was opening day March 19, 2016. We just never looked back. It’s been hard, but easy, and I don’t think any of it has been a struggle,” Julie says.
When you walk into The NEST, it’s hard to miss the huge play house for kids of all ages. Julie and Randy have six grandchildren, two of them being young. Julie didn’t want to lose her “Grammy time” when opening the store, so she came up with the great idea of putting a playhouse in the store. “It has been wonderful! The kids come in with their mothers, or grandparents, and they play in the play house. They can write on walls with chalk. Half the time they leave here crying because they don’t want to leave.”
“We wanted to have those hard to find items, like if you need to go to a baby shower, or to pick up a wedding gift really quick. We didn’t really have anything in Mabank that had that, and now we do!” Randy says. “But the biggest struggle was trying to find what the local people wanted to have. We wanted to be very sensitive to price points, because we know that people can drive to Dallas to get other things but at the same time, we wanted to offer the same type of products. We wanted to make sure that we were very competitive, because it is a different market from Dallas to Mabank Texas.” “I love being with people! I love the people coming in. I love seeing all the smiles and the happy faces. The store feels like home, I don’t feel like I’m going to work every day, it’s like I’m going to my second home.” Says Julie.
“The NEST has become a destination place. It’s a place where people come to have fun and to interact. A customer came in today and said ‘When I walk in the front door, the store makes me smile. This store makes me smile.’ We want to make sure that we greet our customers at the door, to make sure that we thank them for their business.”
Julie and Randy firmly believe “To whom much is given, much is expected.”
Julie emphasized that success to them isn’t all about them. In fact, for Julie Squibb, it’s the opposite. “The biggest prize has been meeting everyone in the community and the fact that The NEST has helped revitalize downtown Mabank.”
To learn more about NEST, please visit the official Market Street NEST Facebook page.
