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Business & Tech

Scrapbook Store Committed to Preserving Memories

What once was just a hobby has now become a popular Greenfield business for Beth Gerlach and Angie Krohn.

Beth Gerlach and Angie Krohn never expected to run a scrapbook store.

“Never,” Gerlach said.

“Never ever,” echoed Krohn.

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In fact, both women started working part-time at nearly a decade ago because the store discount helped subsidize their growing love of the cut-and-paste world of crops and keepsakes.

“I was a cop. It was a fun thing to do,” explained Krohn, mom to a blended family of five kids who retired last August after 20 years as a .

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For Gerlach, who spends her days focused on children and her at-home business, scrapbooking was a lifeline to the grown-up world.

At a scrapbook crop, sometimes known as a krop, women gather for four, eight, even 15 hours at a time to talk as they turn out double-mounted designs full of glittery embellishments and family photos.

“It was a social thing,” said Gerlach, who lives in Milwaukee and has two children of her own.

Then, Lee Friske decided to sell the shop she opened in 1977. The store in the Greenfield Plaza, possibly the first scrapbook store in the Midwest, was about to be relegated to mere memory – and maybe the pages of a sentimental scrapbook.

“We didn’t want to see that happen,” Gerlach said.

So, two women who never thought they would own a scrapbook store decided to give it a shot.

In August 2010, they re-opened the store at its new location on Highway 100, just north of Wal-Mart, in Greenfield.

With a team of 18 employees and instructors, Gerlach and Krohn have worked opposite shifts – Krohn mostly days, Gerlach mostly nights – to create not only an outlet for scrapbook supplies, but also a venue for a growing list of classes and crop events.

It’s become a new home for people like Gloria Beal, who has collected so many scrapbooking supplies since she started in 1998 that she organizes them in tackle boxes.

“We’re all friends,” said Beal, of Greenfield, who teaches basic scrapbooking at the store.

Classes range from $10 for a two-hour session or a Friday night crop to $45 for an all-day crop, which runs from 9 a.m. to midnight and includes lunch, dinner, a goodie bag of new products, door prizes and make-and-take craft and a 10 percent discount on all materials.

So far, attendance has been good. And the sales from the events have carried the store, Gerlach said. But to make sure their crafting community continues to grow, she and Krohn have turned to social networking sites like Facebook to keep in touch with customers.

About 5,500 people subscribe to the store’s newsletter. And, with nearly 900 friends, or "likes," the store is deliriously close to its Facebook goal of 1,000 followers.

Gerlach maintains a blog on the store’s website. That blog links to Facebook, where customers can learn about class schedules or participate in events like the Design Team Call, which invited seasoned scrapbookers to submit an original page design and a greeting card. Three winners were chosen to have their designs displayed in the store. They also got free supplies.

That kind of interaction has made it easier to adjust to the long hours – not enough in a day, if you ask Krohn – leaky roofs and other issues of owning a business.

“It’s a lot more work than I thought it would be,” Krohn admitted.

“It’s also a lot easier opening a small business than I thought,” Gerlach said. “…I still can’t believe it sometimes. I think, ‘What did we do?’ But it’s been a pleasant surprise.”

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