Spring Creek Designs to close doors after 20 years of business | Local News
admin January 25, 2025 0
In a few weeks, Gillette will bid farewell to a longtime business in town.
After running Spring Creek Designs for 20 years, owner and operator Kathy Jones announced this month that she will be closing the doors some time in February after Valentine’s Day. She plans to finish a select number of orders for the holiday, then hold an auction for much of her remaining stock the following week.
She cited staffing shortages as one of the reasons for closing her doors, as well as the long hours needed to manage the storefront and a desire to spend more time with friends and family.
“I’ve been doing it 20 years,” Jones said. “I want to have more time for my grandkids, I want to have more time with my husband, and when you’re working six days a week — during Christmas time I work 90 hours a week — it’s just too much time. I need to slow down, but I’m not ready to give up on flowers.”
Looking back on her time with the shop, Jones also said that a lot has changed in the market over that time, with larger stores making it more difficult to compete.
“The big box stores definitely take a bite out of our business,” she said. “You know, people ordering things online so it’s harder and harder to do the gift side of it. People are ordering online or they’re going to Hobby Lobby… It was easier when we weren’t competing against big box stores.”
But while the store itself will be closing, Jones isn’t walking away from the floral industry entirely. She’ll be scaling back her operations, but she will continue to provide services for some longtime customers.
Her interest in flowers itself has not waned one bit. In fact, Jones expressed a lot of excitement at the extra time she can devote to freelance work and her work with the Society of American Florists, a trade association that represents florists.
“I’m going to take a cooler home, and we have coolers in various places around town that I’m still going to take care of,” Jones said. “I’m still going to take care of people that have standing orders and I’ll reach out to my favorite customers and still take care of them … I want to slow down just a little bit. I don’t want to give up flowers, but I just don’t want to be tied down to a storefront anymore.”
Becky Eischeid, member of the Gillette Main Street board, said that Jones has been a big supporter of keeping the community looking pretty. Jones often is called upon for Christmas decorations, she decorates in the Festival of Trees and she helps supply and maintain the outdoor planters along Gillette Avenue.
“I hate to see the storefront close, because I hate seeing small business closing, but I’m happy to hear that she’s still going to do arrangements out of her house,” Eischeid said.
In addition to her work at Spring Creek Designs here in Gillette, Jones also recently finished her third consecutive year participating in the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California, having worked on the Pasadena Humane and Hill’s Pet Nutrition float.
Jones said she hopes the change will allow her to participate for a fourth year, if she is asked.
“The company was pretty good to work for,” Jones said. “It was a really good experience.”
Asked about the change, Jenn Toumela, a longtime customer at Spring Creek Designs, said she and her husband have been ordering from Jones for much of its 20 years of operation.
“The experience has been wonderful,” Toumela said. “She’s very talented, customer oriented, very creative and very community minded… she just always does a phenomenal job.”
For Renita Castleberry, another longtime customer who met Jones even before she opened Spring Creek Designs, the change was bittersweet. She will miss the shop, but she knows her friend will have more free time for her design work.
“She absolutely loves doing flowers,” Castleberry said. “She’s super talented and I’m really tickled that she’s going to be able to maybe focus more on her designing, now that she’s going to not have the storefront, I think that’s going to be a really good deal for her.”
The customers of Spring Creek Designs will miss Jones, and she will miss them just as much.
“The best part, other than my love affair with flowers, is just the people I’ve met,” Jones said. “I’ve made such great friendships with different customers that I’ve gotten to know really well. They’ve become some of my best friends and it will be hard not to see some of these people come to the store every day. We’ve certainly made a lot of really good friends over the years.”
link