Welcome to our new website DowntownMercantile.com the online presence for our brick & mortar shop The Bremerton Mercantile in Washington State
Your online store for unique gifts, decor, and more!
We are so excited (and a little nervous) that you are here and seeing this site. It is the culmination of a lot of work from our small team in on the Puget Sound in Bremerton, Washington (a 45 minute scenic ferry ride from downtown Seattle and home of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard).
Photos of The Bremerton Mercantile and Bremerton, Washington
A little backstory
We officially opened The Bremerton Mercantile's doors early in 2023 after lots of behind the scenes work in late 2022. We are a family-owned business with a small staff of amazing employees to add fun & soul to our shop. The original reason for opening our shop was that it is on a very prominent corner of downtown Bremerton in the historic Amy Burnett Building, which has seen a lot of empty storefronts over the past decade plus. We are very familiar with the area and believed the time had come to activate the corner.
After getting all of the walls painted, electrical updated, deciding to leave the original wooden floors unfinished, and putting together more shelving than we ever want to see again we then hired our team and started adding all of the inventory into our POS. It was a daunting task to open a store from scratch with a wide range of inventory and categories.
It's been just under a year and the store is hitting its stride. We have offer lots of items from lots of vendors, but we try to keep a focus on unique and/or handmade items from women/veteran/minority-owned businesses and small creators. Another area of focus Pacific Northwest themed or made items since we tend to love where we live and work.
Growing the Shop
Now that our team is sort of knowledgeable in our product offerings and processes, and we are getting more and more requests to ship items to customers, so we took on the added task of opening a website to help make that happen.
Now we get to do all the things again. Set up every item, type in our return policies, figure out shipping, and learn about things like economic nexus (sales tax in other states - that is complicated!).
Getting started with are slowly putting a few things on the site each day so that we don't overwhelm ourselves and we can continue to learn as we grow.
Dad Jokes & Upcoming Things
When I first became a small business owner I sometimes forget that you can have moments of fun in your work. As a dad I'm hooked on dad jokes and puns (our boys' eyes are in going to be stuck in a rolled-up position!). So, I don't feel I could do this first blog post without pausing to say I used to be afraid of hurdles, but I got over them. Was that a groaner? Lol.
We don't know exactly how we will use the Blog on this site long term, but we will definitely make attempts to introduce our team, new products, and maybe even invite some of our product creators to do a post or two.
Welcoming YOU!
As we get started, we ask for a little patience and understanding while we work out any unforeseen kinks. We aren't some big corporation with warehouses and forklifts. We will be packing & shipping all orders directly from our shop, and our store team will be answer your emails between customers and other duties. That said, we live by the Golden Rule and when we get something wrong, we are committed to making things right, so please reach out to us if things don't go as planned and we will get to work helping you. Hopefully, we also just hear from you if we get things right or if you love something you ordered from us.
We appreciate you spending this much time with us already, and hope to provide you with fun, entertaining shopping adventures for a long time to come! So, I invite our new readers to leave a comment, or place an order and help our family-owned company successfully launch the next chapter.