By William Smith
Eric Renteria can’t help but grin every time he looks out the front display windows of his new shop location in the former Sears building in Burlington.
Outside those windows, he sees parking. Lots of parking. Ease of access for his customers he’s been longing for. The kind of parking that just wasn’t available to Myrtle Vera’s Hallmark on Jefferson Street.
As much as he hates to leave downtown, Renteria said, the move was the only way to sustain and grow the business. He said he has cultivated only good memories of his time downtown and championed the idea of calling it the Snake Alley District.
“Parking standards generally call for three-to-seven parking spaces per 1,000 square feet. So we should have had somewhere between 20 and 32 parking spaces for the square footage of retail space that we had downtown,” Renteria said.
Hallmark had four parking spots before the TIGER Grant-funded reconstruction of Jefferson Street and was reduced to three spots after construction.
“We can’t get enough people through the doors to support the business that we want to have with that amount of parking,” he said.
Renteria said he has sold the downtown location to someone who he believes will do great things with the building.
“They’re going to be able to do far more than we could with it,” he said.
Eric has lived all over the country at one point or another but was born and raised in Burlington. He graduated from Burlington High School, and the freshly carpeted floor at his new location reflects that purple school pride.
Coming back to Burlington wasn’t a hard decision. This is home.
“I lived in Wisconsin, Washington, DC, San Antonio, and Miami. I was gone for 20-plus years. I came back, and I’ve been here since 2005,” he said.
The original gift store upon which Myrtle Vera’s is built, Country Friends opened its doors in 1989. Eric and his wife Donna took over in 2015, making the gift store into Myrtle Vera’s Hallmark and Merle Norman Cosmetic Studio. The shop moved from its original location in the 400 block of Jefferson Street to the 600 block of Jefferson Street five years ago.
The Renterias have doubled the greeting card selection, and continue to sell ornaments, Merle Norman Cosmetics, Simply Southern Apparel and Gifts, and hand-crafted cement sculptures by Davenport resident Isabel Bloom. Collectibles by Jim Shore are another vital part of the product line.
“We’re going to be adding a lot more Vera Bradley that will expand our perfumes,” he said. “We’ll have a much bigger, Simply Southern section, and I’m going to build a dressing room in the corner.”
Renteria is also launching a new T-shirt line based around the slogan, “Iowa Nice.”
“We just did our first design. So we’re starting to try to come up with our next lines and designs for that,” Renteria said.
Aside from the 3,500 square foot of recently installed purple carpet, the Renteria’s have spent the past month painting, changing out ceiling tiles and windows, and doing general cleanup.
The downtown location will be open through April 17, and the new location in City Center is set to open May 1.
That will give the Renterias and their employees enough time to move the inventory and other items, such as display racks. They’ve also hired two additional staff.
“The building was in pretty good shape,” Eric Renteria said, noting that it’s about twice the size of the downtown store.
The higher traffic count along Roosevelt Avenue neighboring businesses such as Billy Sims BBQ and Wing Stop will only elevate the Hallmark store, Renteria said.
“We love our customers, they’re so great to us. We’ve gotten to know so many of them. And we’ve built relationships with so many of them. They’re excited for us. They’re as excited as we are. They know we’re going to have a better selection and better stuff. And it’s just a fun shopping experience,” Renteria said.
A 50-percent off moving sale on select items will begin Saturday.