In 1997, my husband and I decided to make a big change and move our family form Boca Raton, Florida to Blowing Rock, NC.  We bought a house over the phone  (true – we really did this), sold our house in Florida, quit our jobs (he was an accountant and I worked for a large hospital as an HR manager) and dragged our children along.  Why?  Lifestyle.

What do we do now?

Once we where settled in our new home, we needed to figure out what we where going to do now.  We had three children to raise and bills to pay.  We started looking for traditional jobs; however, we wanted something different.  One day, we came across a shop for rent in busy downtown Blowing Rock.  It was a bit off the beaten path and friends advised to stay away from that location, no one ever survived there.  But, we knew we would need to be different. We rented the shop.

Now….what are we going to sell?

Now what…..we knew nothering about owning a shop or purchasing goods.  We wanted to be different and have fun merchandise that people wanted.  Standing out and becoming a different type of shop in Blowing Rock is no easy task.  Our discovery came during our first shopping trip to Atlanta’s Americasmart.

We where lost, the market was larger than we ever imagined and, basically, we did not have a clue what we where doing.  While wondering around the temporary garden booths, I came across a Mexican Chiminea.  I was intrigued….I had never seen anything like this before.  We placed a small order.

We are now on the map.

Our pretty chimineas where delivered, we decided to place one outside the shop…..WOW, people took notice.  Slowly our shop turned into a fun, Mexcan Import Shop carrying all types of colorful, happy merchandise.  We found something different.  Slowly, we began to visit and shop in Mexico, buying from small producers.  Our small shop became part of the traffice pattern, we where on the map.

Time flies…fast forward 26 years.

Over the years, we moved to main street and our inventory expanded to include other types of merchandise.  The merchadise from our friends in Mexico remained our draw, but we now carried something for everybody.   Keeping up the times, in 2016 we decided to start a website selling our Mexican treasures.  However, during the 2020 Covid shutdown,  MexDecor.com became my focus and started to grow.  In 2022, we sold our main street business and started a new chapter. We decided to continue on line and create a new site – MountainSue!

Life changes, we wanted less work hours and more fun hours……so, I decided to start MountainSue.