Everything Passes Through This Room

The dining table in my house hasn't held an actual dinner in close to a year. It's where the steamer lives now, and the garment rack, and usually a stack of tags I'm cutting down and re-pinning. If you came over, you'd be eating on your lap, probably next to a sweater drying flat on a towel.

People picture more going on behind GiaNina Gifts than there is. A little team, maybe. Someone steaming while someone else answers messages. There isn't a team. There's me, deciding what's good enough to sell and what isn't, photographing everything on the same wall in the same light so a picture actually tells you the truth, writing the description, printing the label, carrying the package to the post office myself. If something's wrong with an order, I'm the one who finds out, and I'm the one who fixes it. No one to hand it off to and no one to blame it on either.

Some weeks that's a lot. I won't pretend every one of those steps is my favorite part of the day. But I'll take the trade. Nothing leaves this house that I haven't looked at twice.

There's a Geoffrey Beene sweater on the rack right now, navy and white stripe, men's XL, the kind of plain good sweater that doesn't need me to talk it up. Before it ever got photographed I ran my fingers along the V-neck trim checking for pulls, held it up to the light for anything the camera might miss, and only then decided it earned a spot in the shop. There's no policy written down anywhere for that. It's just what happens when there's only one set of hands doing the looking.

I think about that a lot, actually, how much of this job is just paying attention. Nobody's checking my work. So I have to be the kind of person who checks it anyway, every time, even on the days I'd rather not.

That's really the whole shop, if I'm honest with you. One person, trying to treat every item and every customer the way she'd want to be treated if the roles were switched. I don't always get it right. I try to get it right enough that you can trust what shows up at your door.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective