Cottage Gift Shop is grand prize winner of Pearson's Simply Primitives "What's Your Story" contest

April 24, 2012 - PRLog -- The Cottage Gift Shop was selected as the grand prize winner in the "What's Your Story" contest hosted by the Birdsboro, Pennsylvania doll making company Pearson's Simply Primitives.  Store owners from across the country submitted stories telling how they started out and got to where they are today.  The contest lasted for four weeks and each week a finalist was selected.  The Cottage Gift Shop was picked as the winner for week four with what Tammy and Eric Pearson described as "a great story of a quarter century from the beginning until now.  A story of love, distance, and serendipity to bring these two (Tom and Betsy Gorman, owners of the Cottage Gift Shop) together and realize their dream!"  Then the stories of the four finalists were posted on Pearson's Simply Primitives Facebook page where fans were encouraged vote for their favorite.  Following several weeks of voting the Cottage Gift Shop was chosen as the overall winner and received the grand prize of $500 in merchandise.  The Cottage Gift Shop is a family owned business specializing in country and primitive home decor located between Elmira and Corning, New York.  Here is Tom Gorman's prize winning story.

Back in 1988 a co-worker of mine told me that her sister had opened a shop selling hand-made crafts in an old  garage behind her parents’ home.  She proudly showed me photos of the same, Clorinda’s Country Cottage in Elmira, New York.  At that time I was in the Army and stationed in Augsburg, Germany and had no idea that someday I would get to visit this shop, let alone one day own it.  A year later this co-worker and I began dating.  It wasn’t long before we fell in love with one another and became engaged.

My fiancé had already made plans not to reenlist in the Army and to return to her hometown to pursue a teaching degree.  I had also already made plans to remain in the Army in Germany for another year to attend advanced training in Munich.  In December of 1989 her enlistment ended and we both returned to the states together, her for good and me on leave.  Her parents prepared a room for me in their lovely home and I spent a wonderful week there getting to know her family and celebrating the Christmas season.  During that week I got to see her sister’s shop in person.  It was an almost magical place, made to look like a quaint cottage outside and filled inside with lovingly-made country crafts and beautifully decorated for Christmas.

How quickly that week flew by and before I knew it I was headed back to Germany on New Year’s Eve leaving my fiancé behind.  With the new year came new challenges for both of us and days turned into weeks and the weeks into months.  We wrote each other often and shared short and very expensive phone calls each Sunday.

Soon it was June and I returned to the states again on leave but this time to elope with my fiancé in Florida.  The ceremony was held in a beautiful garden at the courthouse in Sarasota and we had a wonderful honeymoon before returning to New York state where my Mother-in-law had arranged a big party to celebrate our marriage.  Then it was back to Germany for another six months before returning to the states for good just before Christmas.  

My wife and I again celebrated Christmas with her family.   During the visit my In-laws talked with the whole family, planning for their golden years and the protection of the family home after they had passed.  My wife’s siblings weren’t interested in the home as they already had places of their own to live.  This unexpected opportunity seemed like a good way for my wife and I to solve this family problem and we agreed to purchase the property which included the garage that housed the gift shop, with her parents retaining life tenancy.  A payment schedule was set up and my wife’s parents’ fears about the future were allayed.  During this visit I also got to check out Clorinda’s once again.  The business had grown quite a bit, with the addition of another room, and the entire shop was packed full of even more hand-made country crafts than a year earlier.

The coming year found us starting off our married life together on a new adventure with my next Army assignment in Monterey, California.  We had both been stationed there several times before, even at the same times, but oddly it wasn’t until when we were in Germany that we had met.  We spent a great year and a half in California and then another unexpected thing happened, the Army wanted to reduce the number of senior soldiers in its ranks and offered to pay me a large bonus to leave the Army.  My wife and I talked it over and decided to accept the Army’s offer.

We returned to New York and used some of the bonus money to purchase a home of our own not far from her parents.  We settled in to our new home, found jobs and began a whole new chapter in our married life together.  We also spent lots of time with my in-laws, celebrating lots of birthdays and holidays, and helping with general upkeep of the home and yard work.  My wife also took a few craft project classes that her sister offered at her shop.  Sometimes I even got involved, helping my wife to basecoat and stain pieces for her sister. For the next eleven years I worked at the Post Office and I was able to buy back my federal service time for the fourteen years that I had spent in the Army.

In 2003 my sister-in-law sold the bulk of her inventory of crafts she had made and closed the shop.  The building soon became a storage area for a huge inventory of unfinished craft project supplies that she had accumulated over the years.  Later that same year, my wife and I, saddened by the shop’s closing and conversion to storage area, offered to purchase the inventory and supplies with plans to one day reopen for business on just weekends.  Everyone in the family thought we were crazy because we already both had full time jobs and because we didn’t know anything about crafting other than the few classes my wife had taken.  But we were determined to make a go at it.  We organized and categorized all the crafting supplies and then began with the simplest projects we could find and began creating.  Eventually we were tackling more detailed projects and before we knew it we had produced enough to fill the shop.

Then another unexpected thing happened, the Post Office decided to reduce its number of employees and offered an early retirement for those with 25 years of federal service.  Once again my wife and I had a decision to make, talking it over and weighing our options before deciding to accept the offer.

I worked my final day at the Post Office on May 26, 2004 and opened the Cottage Gift Shop for business at noon that same day.  Both of my wife’s parents are  gone now and we live in the family home with our gift shop just outside the back door in the old garage. In addition to our own creations we now offer a large variety of quality country and primitive home decor from crafters and manufacturers across the country.  Next year we will be celebrating 25 years as a family-owned business.