Jul 20, 2011

Salty Not Sweet moves into Ohio City’s SoLo neighborhoodBy Laura DeMarcoCleveland.com

It was hard for Candra Squire to make the move.

But she did it, and she’s glad.

After opening up her quirky alt-craft and gift shop Salty Not Sweet on Waterloo Road in the spring of 2010, she just didn’t get the foot traffic she’d hoped for.

“We could go days without any walk-ins,” says Squire, who co-owns Salty Not Sweet with fellow artisan Melissa Major and makes — yes, you’ve got it — the salty-but-not-sweet greeting cards and stationery that the store carries.

“We were hoping it would grow, but it just wasn’t quick enough for us. We wanted something that would grow quicker.” So she quietly closed up the store at the end of last year and not so quietly reopened on the new SoLo area of West 25th Street at the end of May.

SoLo, as in South of Lorain, is another growing area where vendors such as Squire and Danielle DeBoe, who owns the nearby Room Service store, have decided to take a chance. It’s the first time retail development — or anything new, really — has moved south of the West Side Market in the Ohio City area.

“It’s going really well, there’s so much more traffic in the neighborhood. It’s so much more alive any day, but especially on market days,” says Squire.

Squire’s new space is also larger than her Waterloo shop, allowing her to add more vintage clothing and vendors to the mix of jewelry, soaps and candles, edgy T-shirts, funky baby clothes, little-girl tutus, greeting cards and more. The necklaces and earrings made out of repurposed objects (old ornaments, vinyl records, etc.) are especially cool.

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