For the second time in nearly 17 years in business, Elizabeth Donnelly has found a new home for the Shirt Shop.
Donnelly relocated earlier this month to her new home at 9 W. Madison Ave., on the south side of the downtown square.
She moved from the old Shannon Building (20 W. Jackson) because that building has sold, Donnelly said.
“I would never have initiated a move for myself, but I think this new location is going to work out well,” she said. “It’s a fantastic space.”
Donnelly has moved into the former Home Detail building, which has been closed for more than four years.
After being notified in early November of the pending sale of her old building, Donnelly approached Roberta Johnson — who still owned the Home Detail site — and asked about renting a space.
“She didn’t think she’d be able to,” Donnelly said, because the store was filled with supplies, old records and other assorted items.
But Johnson reconsidered a week later, and agreed to rent the space to Donnelly.
That give Donnelly and a handful of friends about two weeks to move her screen shop machinery, office furniture, shelving and mountains of shirts and other merchandise.
“Several trips to the dump were made,” she said, eyeing a stack of boxes still aligned along the wall near her office. “Maybe I should have made some more.”
She completed the move a week ago, just before Christmas Eve.
“”It was a relief,” Donnelly laughed. “It might have been the best Christmas present of them all.”
IN THE days since then, Donnelly has getting acclimated to her new work areas.
“I’m still unloading boxes, trying to figure out where everything goes,” she said. “And there are a few minor items I still need to do in the back.”
While her new shop has less space, “it’s going to work well because it’s efficient space,” she said.
For example, her embroidery machine is in a separate room entirely.
“That’s a good thing because you really don’t want a machine like that out in the open, for safety reasons,” she said.
THE WEEKS after Christmas tend to be calmer than at other points of the year, Donnelly said, allowing her time to get acclimated to her new home.
“By the time March 1 gets there, it’s go time,” she said. “If there was a good time to move, this was it. Right now, my priority is filling customer orders.”
The Shirt Shop offers custom screen print and embroidery, as well as vinyl lettering for signs, magnetic signs, “pretty much anything,” she said.
Her new home also will allow Donnelly to place a greater emphasis on retail sales, rather than focus solely on custom orders.
She is uncertain if her hours will change. “I may stay open during the lunch hour because of the traffic,” she said.
Contact information will remain unchanged, by calling 365-5050, or via email at shirtshop@cox.net. Donnelly also can be reached via Shirt Shop’s Facebook page.
MOVING across the square is bittersweet in some aspects, Donnelly said.
For one, she’s bidding adieu to her old neighbors, such as the accountants at Jarred, Gilmore Phillips, P.A.
“I knew on nights that I’d be working late at night, you knew somebody was in the same boat. They’d be working right next door.”
Donnelly also will miss her old landlord, Bob Hawk, who is selling the Shannon building.
“I appreciated having him as a landlord,” she said. “It was nice to get to know him on a personal level.”
And in moving, Donnelly recalls her early days in business, when her father, John, would help around the shop.
“One of the areas he’d help was with the dryer,” she said, “We could carry on conversations while we worked. I’d just been thinking about him a lot.”
John Ornelas died in 2012.
Likewise, son Alex, now a fourth-grader at Lincoln Elementary School, has been a fixture around the shop since he was an infant.
“He’s getting old enough that he can help around here,” she said.
Donnelly opened the Shirt Shop in 2000, and was stationed at 3 N. Jefferson Ave. for about eight years, before moving to the Shannon building.
