AEDP and The Seedling Collective
The Seedling Collective, a unique pop-up space in Old Town Alexandria for fledgling business, will be closing at the end of this year.
Two more popups are schedule in the space -- Lucuma Boutique & Sophie Blake, NY (now through Dec. 3) and Oasis on Royal from Dec. 6 through Jan. 8.
The Seedling Collective was a small retail storefront that welcomed a variety of local and further-away businesses experiment with brick-and-mortar retail with no long-term commitment and few start-up costs.
The Seedling Collective, which received significant support from the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership, started in 2019 and hosted monthly or bi-monthly popups with only a brief break during the pandemic.
Founder Meaghan Foran said that she'll be turning the space back into an extension of her other company, Alexandria & Company (Alx&Co.), which has grown in the past several years.
Here's the complete note from Foran explaining the change — and encouraging residents to continue shopping local this holiday season.
I write this note with a lot of excitement and a twinge of sadness. Yes, after four years of running The Seedling Collective, I am officially announcing that as of 2024 we will no longer be serving as a pop-up resource. Instead, I will be re-opening the studio to serve as a gallery and lounge space for my other baby, Alexandria & Company. This is exciting in the sense that we have grown Alx&Co. so successfully over the last few years that we need this space to serve our clients, but I am sad to know that we will no longer get to see other small businesses thrive in this lucky little studio.
Getting to know your businesses and seeing you creatively transform this small space into beautiful store fronts has been so fun, and Antra and I value the relationships we have built with the individual owners we have met over the years. When I first started The Seedling Collective, I had high hopes but little to no experiential knowledge of how to run it. There is truly nothing like this in or around our city, so I had to wing it. I learned a lot of lessons of the years, some good and some more painful, but in the end what has been the most rewarding part of this journey has been seeing the creative energy emanate from this space. Your work helped make this concept successful, and I thank you all for taking a chance with our little gem of a pop-up studio.
I sincerely hope that the studio has served as a useful launching pad for your own work and that you will continue to thrive in our small business community. I also hope that The Seedling Collective can serve as inspiration to other commercial property owners to be open to non-traditional leasing experiences. We aren’t closing for lack of interest or profit - indeed, we have been consistently fully booked since reopening after COVID, with amazing tenants who have always treated our space with respect. Rather, we are closing because I need room to grow Alx&Co., and the studio at The Seedling Collective is the resource I can access to do that. And, don’t worry: Antra is staying with us! She’ll continue designing for our clients at Alx&Co. and further her marketing work with us there.
In the meantime, I hope you will continue to shop and visit our remaining pop-ups for the year, Lucuma Boutique + Sophie Blake in November and Oasis on Royal in December. I know I am preaching to the choir, but please, please focus on shopping local this holiday season. Your patronage means the world to the shop owners you visit.
Hope to see you all at The Studio soon!
~ Meaghan
