Aug 17, 2007

Gift shop owner finds her Missing PieceBy Mariella SavidgeMcCall.com

The fruits of Karen Sampson’s energy and enthusiasm are attractively arranged all around her shop, The Missing Piece, in Bushkill Township. While the shop is lovely, her route to ownership is just as intriguing.

“I am so, so, so lucky,” she says.

She loves her job.

Some might say it was her hard work and persistence that landed her in the picture-perfect, old-fashioned mercantile shop with wooden floors and exposed beams — the perfect background for the collections of primitive and country home furnishings and accessories she sells. But no. According to Sampson, it was all fate and a series of happy coincidences.

Take the jewelry counter, right next to the cash register, for instance. She bought it at the Christmas Barn when the longtime holiday store recently closed its doors for good.

When she was buying the case, Christmas Barn employees told her they got it from John Gould’s, a store that years ago occupied a spot on the triangle in Emmaus, where Sampson is from.

Her uncle used to work for John Gould, she says, and as a child she probably watched him arrange displays in the very same case in and on which she now showcases silver necklaces and Jody Coyote earrings.

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