Longtime local craft store DeShia to close

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

After three decades of providing crafts and collectibles, the DeShia shop on U.S. 127 is closing.

Owner Karen Miller made the announcement on Thursday, noting that plans are to mostly close the shop by the end of the year, although the store will probably have some hours available in January to sell off inventory, as long as the building hasn’t sold by then.

“It was a practical business decision,” Karen Miller said, although she acknowledged the decision to close was also an emotional one to make after 30 years in business.

The Millers, Karen, a Van Wert native, and her husband, Rob, who hails from Michigan, returned to the area when Rob, now a retired educator, took a school administrator’s position in the area.

The couple, which had operated a home-based crafts business for several years in the early 1980s before moving to Van Wert, saw a building for sale at 11872 U.S. 127 that had housed an antiques business and decided to purchase the building to house their craft business.

The first year, the Millers sold fresh-cut Christmas trees and their own craft items, before adding craft items

“We had a flourishing business,” Rob Miller said, noting that he had retired from Van Wert City Schools and had taken an assistant superintendent’s position at Elida, but later retired a second time to help full-time with DeShia and start his own golf club sales and repair shop.

The Millers constructed two additions to the building, one in 1996 and the second in 1998, doubling the store’s capacity, and had up to six employees before competition from Internet retail sites began to impact the business the past few years.

The business flourished during the 1990s and early 2000s, with Karen noting she used to spend thousands of dollars at craft shows on items for the shop to keep up with customer demand.

The couple also started a lunchroom business in a portion of the building, but that business declined after a few years when the then-store manager left to take another job, and Karen couldn’t afford a replacement for her.

What both Millers said they’ll miss the most is the people they’ve dealt with: the vendors and the customers.

“Our vendors became our friends, our customers became our friends,” Karen Miller said, noting that the business had more than 3,000 people in its mailing list. “It’s just amazing the people that we’ve met.”

She noted that the hardest thing she has had to deal with is her feeling that she’s disappointing her customers, especially those who have been shopping at the store for decades.

Karen noted the store had benefited greatly from people traveling along U.S. 127, who saw the shop and decided to stop, but that also hurt the business a couple of years ago when road construction drastically limited the number of people on the highway.

“That’s when I started thinking about closing,” said Karen, who said the road construction, combined with competition from online vendors, was beginning to take a financial toll on the business.

The couple said the situation with DeShia is not unusual, though, with many brick-and-mortar stores suffering from online competition. Karen said she started to see the handwriting on the wall when the Rustic Hutch, a similar business that had three locations in Fort Wayne, Indiana, went out of business.

Karen said this was the first year the shop decided not to hold its annual Christmas event, a sad admission that the store was going to close. She said it will be hard coping with the closure for a while, since she loved everything she did related to the business.

“I even loved paying the bills, when the money was there,” she said with a laugh.

But she also noted the couple plans to find a positive alternative to DeShia, with a return to a home-based business or possibly a consulting business in the future. Rob, who still does some substitute teaching on occasion and enjoys it, said he would continue to do that, while also helping Karen with whatever she decides to do.

“We’re not going to travel, we’re not going to sit home and do nothing,” Rob said. “We’re looking for a change and Karen is excited about what the possibilities might be, and I am too.”