Canterbury Lane a Store for All Seasons
Tulsa, OK – Robin Benesh loves her commercial empire, all 1,035 square feet of it. Her gift shop, Canterbury Lane, is tucked neatly into a corner of the Shops of Seville on the northeast corner of East 101st Street and Yale Avenue. It has turned out exactly as she wanted it, a small and friendly place where customers can feel unhurried and get exactly the gift they want from a sales staff trained to give maximum support. It’s an old-fashioned shop where the regulars are greeted by name and a stranger is made to feel comfortable at once. “A lot of people like the human contact,” says Benesh, “so we make sure we take the time to give it to them.”
It’s a store she obviously enjoys enormously, but ironically it was born out of a sense of loss. “My mother was a vibrant, beautiful woman who taught me as a child how to wrap beautiful packages and make bows. Then she got Alzheimer’s disease and I watched this lovely person fading away. I started making bows as a form of therapy, I guess, and gradually the idea of a gift shop came to me.”
