Third Chapter Curious, Vol. 9

“Biophilic Locality”

KAREN ROOFE 

Owner & Founder, My Secret Stash & I’m Planty and Fancy 

Merchandise Chair, Up North Pride

[Recorded December 10, 2024 at My Secret Stash, Traverse City, Michigan]

“Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.” - James Cash Penny

Nature sets examples that we could all benefit from if only we paid more attention. Plants, in particular, require certain environmental standards, and each one is different in their needs, as are people. We don’t know off-hand what those needs are, nor can we be expected to. What matters is that we take the time and effort to learn and understand nuance—how to care and show love.

Every town has a group of figureheads that represent the community. They take the reins of representing the interests and flourishing of individuals and businesses while working overtime to improve their neighborhoods. If they are exceptional, they add character and charm to their surroundings as well. 

While the world’s issues are serious and ever-multiplying, it is possible to be seriously unserious, straddling the balance of urgency and playfulness, otherwise, life is bleak. All the world’s a stage, and the show must go on. 

If we have strength and resources, we are called to persist in bringing relief to others. With that sense of responsibility, it is possible to make the world a little brighter by focusing on what we can change in our immediate reach, with the hope that others will carry the light to their next destination, where it will be picked up and shared. 

Karen Roofe is one of the aforementioned figureheads in our community. She’s an inherent presence in Traverse City and someone I consider an icon, though she’d never refer to herself as one. She’s someone I’m grateful to know, proud to work for and someone who made me a better human as a result of our meeting. 

INTERVIEWER:  

“Traverse City has a high concentration of dynamic people—I’m consistently musing on how we all arrived here, bringing contrasting backgrounds to form an increasingly diverse community. People here are very entrepreneurial, very enterprising, and hard-working. Many of us are transplants but have some established history before our ‘permanent’ arrival. I know that you're originally from the east side of Michigan—I want to know what brought you here, and hear about all of the adventures in between; what influenced your journey?”

KAREN: 

“After graduating from college, I lived in Lansing with my husband at the time, though we ultimately decided to move to Oregon. I found that if you like Oregon, you’ll like Northern Michigan—it's a similar environment; both are in the 45th parallel zone. We loved Oregon and the lifestyle it offered us in its landscape because we could hike on the Pacific coast, then drive into the mountains, pass into the prairies, and end up back home within an hour. A lot of diverse scenery is shared between the Pacific Northwest and northern Michigan.

I love the vibe and the coastal feel, it’s specific and makes you feel a certain way that’s hard to describe, but if it’s your jam, you just get it, and can’t get enough of it.

After Oregan, we moved to San Francisco and were happy there, but after we decided to start a family, my good Midwestern sense told me it wasn’t the place for us to raise kids. 

San Francisco is fantastic, but big-city living doesn’t allow for much freedom and stability for kids or parents. I grew up as a latchkey kid, coming and going freely but with a good home base, so there was balance, and it worked. I wanted my kids to have a similar kind of life, to just be kids and play outside all day with the neighborhood kids, so San Francisco was not going to work.  As so many people from Michigan do, we came back home, this time settling in Traverse City. We didn't want to live in Flint, where I’m from, we didn't want to live in Muskegon, where my former husband was from, and we didn't want to go back to Lansing because ‘been there done that.’

Detroit wasn't quite right either, and we didn’t want to do the suburb, metro-area thing. We came here 11 years ago—I’ve been here since and haven’t thought about moving again. I'm at the age where I’m starting to think about retiring…”

INTERVIEWER:

“But knowing you, will you ever fully retire?” 

KAREN:  

“Well, that's the goal. I won’t stop doing, but yes, I want to slow the daily grind. I have family in Florida, but I have zero desire to live there, so I think I’ll retire here. I'll go places and travel, but I don't think that will permanently take me away—this is a good home base.

I’ve had many rewarding and stressful years as an artist, maker, and business owner, so I’m anxious to change my game. 

Artists and makers rarely have a consistent life the way you would if you were a ‘proper’ business person—we see and move differently. Yes, I have retirement and savings and am a planner in that way, but I never see the end, if that makes sense. 

When you open a business, strategic and cerebral people consider the end game, the exit strategy. My exit strategy is, crudely put: I die, and then my kids run it or sell it off. I've never thought critically about an alternative.

What I will say is that I'm now 56 and thinking about what my transition plan will be. 

I want to remain involved and connected but without a constant physical presence. I’d prefer to prepare my management team to take the reins and become more independent.  If I have people who can replace me, it creates opportunities for you kids to advance your careers, and I'll have more time to focus on other aspects of my life. I’m not totally sure what those will become, but that’s a fun new challenge.

If I get to a point where I can touch base without being as hands-on, that would be a win-win situation. Don’t get me wrong, I love being here, but I want to be able to take off and go do whatever else I feel called to do. I see that as my future.

This is a very heart-and-soul business as opposed to if I were a lawyer or in a situation where I’d work until I can’t anymore, and then just be done, sell the firm, or have inside people do everything while I retain the name. Symbolically you’re there, but you’re not involved. 

A place like this doesn't necessarily have that, it's very tied to the community, and I’m gratefully integral to it.”

INTERVIEWER:

“You are certainly a frontwoman in the community, so I understand wanting to be here yet not wanting to be here in the same way. It's kind of a Catch-22. I see how packed your calendar is on any given day. You’re running the show here at the store, you’re a board member, you’re a business mentor, you’re a mother, and you give everything 100% of your focus—truly doing it all. 

Where do you get your energy? I'm 31 and also trying to do a million things. I struggle with finding balance and I face critical burnout at least once or twice a year. How do you manage your life to find balance and prevent burning out?”

KAREN:

“Oh, I do burnout. Everyone does, that’s just reality.

I don’t care what anyone says. You can have every safeguard in place, have wellness practices, or pretend you’re okay, but if you want this life, burnout comes with the territory. 

I'm one of the creative entrepreneurs with high-functioning ADHD, so we think differently. One of the ways I protect myself is to find people who can do things I can't do. 

I have a good team—I can rattle off my list of crazy stuff and say, ‘Here's my priority A, B, C, D, now feed it out to everybody else accordingly,’ knowing that I have people with specific talents that can make sense of my stream of consciousness and make it functional.

Do the things that only you can do. Find and empower others to do what they can do in a way that helps them grow. That's how I manage burnout, and I hope that it’s conducive to positive change for all of us.

Having said that, there are times that I come home and if I sit down, or God forbid, lay down, I’m down for the count and there's no getting back up until the next day. We’re all just humans and you can only push yourself so far before your body takes over and forces you to rest. It is what it is, but I’m now recognizing the need to find some chill in my life.”

INTERVIEWER:

“I have so much respect and appreciation for the honesty of that answer. I feel like all of us who operate with ADHD, creative brains carry challenges with juggling multiple projects, not to mention multiple businesses, as you do. Specifically, I’m thinking about memories I have from shopping at Apogee, the sister store to My Secret Stash.

I have that beautiful leather fringe handbag I bought from Apogee years ago that I showed you the other day, and I remembered it was you who helped me pick it out. On another trip there I bought a couple of Joy Susan bags, a big wool blanket, and a bunch of other stuff when you were having a sidewalk sale. This is an unlocked memory for me—I said something to the effect of, ‘You guys can't close down, this is my favorite store in town!’ I felt happy and safe there because I had great experiences with the staff and there were always Pride flags in the windows, and you told me that the store was just moving into a new space and would still have the same spirit, including the Pride flags. 

That turned out to be My Secret Stash. I did not realize until a couple of years after that these places I adored were intertwined. I love how far back that history goes and now today, I work for you at this ‘other store’—it’s such a great example of connections that are meant to be and I like to think of those previous interactions as lying the groundwork for what is now a major part of my current life. Can you share the trajectory of your career and what led you to start your portfolio of businesses?”

KAREN:

“Years ago when I was downstate, I was focused on making bath and body products to sell in little shops similar to My Secret Stash. I was a vendor back then, selling wholesale and consignment without a brick-and-mortar store of my own.

In time, I got tired of doing art shows and schlepping 2,000 pounds of soap in the summer. It's exhausting, sweaty, and back-breaking, and it sucked up every weekend during the season. My kids, my husband, and I would all go and do it together, and while it was fun and cute, it got old and the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

I was in retail for years before My Secret Stash, in management roles within high-volume stores like Lush Cosmetics, Victoria’s Secret, Limited Brands, and Structure, which became Express Men, Pottery Barn, and Williams-Sonoma, as opposed to Mom-and-Pop shops. All great experiences, but I reached a point where I wanted to stay home and quit working crazy corporate retail hours and make soap with my kids—I’m a fourth generation soap-maker so that was an easy transition that made sense. The kids were at an age where they were travelable and could come with me to art shows and street fairs. It was something we enjoyed doing as a family and a welcome transition from a rigorous day-to-day work life.

In 2014 we got this building on Cass Street that we’re sitting in now, establishing My Secret Stash as a brick-and-mortar.

I reached out to all the artist friends I met from shows and fairs and invited them to sell their pieces at the shop, and that's how it all started, the rest is history.

There have been some tangents in the iterations of having a physical store, but they’ve had a similar framework.

I opened a store in Charlevoix for one season, then I had a little marketplace around the corner from us on State Street for a short time. They’ve come and gone—maybe they were unsuccessful for different reasons but I don't look at them as failures, I’ve just tried a lot of things. 

I understood the parameters and risks of business ownership, and after wrapping up each of my past stores I would pull back to my main location, which then was Apogee. 

My Secret Stash is an iteration of Apogee but with an emphasis on Michigan artists. In the early days of Stash, the pieces we carried were 98% Michigan-made.

I wanted to sell items that were all different price points and accessible, so I added in some cool national brands that produced smaller, inexpensive but still unique things so everyone would be able to walk out with something they loved.

Apogee was the higher-end sister store to Stash. A little more bougie but still had an eclectic flair to it. We carried things like furniture, rugs, candles, fine art, and jewelry, and it was designed with that type of customer in mind. The layout and set-up of the store itself were very Pinterest and upscale.

I’m Planty AF, the newest addition to the portfolio, has a special meaning to me, and is close to my heart.

My sister passed away a few years ago. She loved plants and always had different, beautiful plants at her place in Florida that were a part of her whole space, inside and outside. All of us in my family have a love for plants and are bonded by our shared interests. 

I was with my sister in Florida for the last weeks of her life, and I returned to Michigan with a bunch of Tillandsia [air plants]. I thought I would just have them at the store as an homage—I could be thinking of my sister while I was in that mourning phase to help me carry on at work. People who were in my store saw and loved them, and asked me if they could buy them. So I’d occasionally sell one or two and they’d come back asking about other kinds of plants and if I could get specific varieties. I have another sister who works in a greenhouse with all sorts of plants so I started reaching out to her for direction and it just started to become a thing.  My friend Garrett, who was kind of my partner in the founding of Planty, was very knowledgeable about all kinds of plants, and I was very into Tillandsia, so we started geeking out together and soon enough the plant store was born.

Garrett’s daytime life ultimately pulled him away from Traverse City and Planty AF, and it was heartbreaking for both of us. That was just one of those ‘life happens’ things, but he’ll always be a part of it. All of these businesses I’ve started continue to have ‘friends of the store’ that were integral in the beginning planning stages and still a part of the spirit of each space. It’s always people first with me.

I'm proud of what I’ve built. Historically I’ve bootstrapped everything I've ever done without a business loan and just figured out how to make it happen.

As we continue to grow and evolve, it would be great to hire a graphic designer to do a branding overhaul, have logos and new merch that are coordinated, that type of thing, and have a bigger brand presence with a larger digital marketplace. 

I don't want to be the one who is doing every single thing anymore—I want to hire people, give them a good life, and let them do what they know how to do and are passionate about. Then the business evolves, becoming a coordinated effort or partnership versus servitude to me. I would like to keep growing the business so I can afford to pay people to a level where they feel like they're in business with me.”

INTERVIEWER:

“Well we love you—you take care of us. Percentage-wise, you do a lot more than most high-volume corporate retail establishments offer so that’s a testament to how you look after your people.

It's such a privilege to have all of these different things at the store and I’ve learned so much throughout my near-year here because the focus on education and experimentation is intrinsic to our work.

Your stores' influence on the Traverse City community stands out for me—after Apogee I was shopping at My Secret Stash for years and had no idea that this was all your work behind the scenes! It's so obvious now that the stores were related, and that connection just was lost on me for a while but it finally clicked that all of these places were connected. That realization made me so happy because they were and are my favorite stores in Traverse City.

I now picture you just running across the street, through back alleys, doing a costume change,  and popping up at your different stores.”

KAREN: 

“That’s quite literally how it was, and still is. I’m everywhere baby!”

INTERVIEWER:

“You make it all happen! And your stores are always cool and unique. I see people’s reactions when they walk in and have a magical moment while taking in their surroundings. The environment has a way of bringing out a more relaxed and whimsical side of everyone who crosses the threshold.

It certainly has that effect on me, which is why I made it a point to come to your stores every time I came to town.

I love that we teach people about the artists who create the pieces we have, or about plants and plant care, and by extension, set an example of how to be open-minded humans because of what we stand for.

I'm learning so much, particularly about plants, and this job holds rewarding discoveries every day. I want to circle back to what we spoke about earlier, about how your plant knowledge developed and grew to where you now have a diverse collection of plants—can you go more in-depth on that?”

KAREN:

“My mom and my sister are outdoor plant people—their landscape designs are always beautiful, while mine, not so much. In northern Michigan, the summer is all you have to take care of those types of plants, and in the summer I'm always downtown working my butt off, so I never have time to tend vegetable gardens or even shrubberies. I don't know anything about outdoor plants.

I just turn the sprinklers on and hope they grow.

Indoor plants are more my jam—they're year-round, and I can learn about them at a pace that fits into my schedule.

It all started with Tillandsia, that was my thing. Just like I started you off with Tillandsia and said, ‘Learn everything about this plant, get comfortable with it, become an expert, then do the same process with the next type of plant, and on you go,’ that’s exactly how I did it.

I never present myself as a college-educated botanist or horticulturist; I'm just a person who loves house plants.” 

INTERVIEWER:

“Of all you're doing, your involvement with Up North Pride is a highlight. It’s an essential part of our community, especially with the current upheaval in our country. 

It’s one of the most meaningful Pride events and communities that I've been a part of because it's so region-specific, and there’s a real identity to it. It's a smaller community compared to when I lived in Los Angeles, I lived near West Hollywood and we had ‘WeHo Pride’ but that’s still a large number of people and is a huge party. In my recollection, it focused more on the spectacle than the issues at hand, regardless of the party scene being the organizers’ intention or not.”

KAREN:

“Completely, and it's sustained throughout the year, it's always a part of our community. If you’re walking around Traverse City, or even in towns further out from the city center where you’d assume there wouldn’t be as much support, you see Up North Pride signs in so many neighborhoods and businesses year-round, and that’s incredible. Those little rainbow circle yard signs and stickers on people's cars make you feel like you’re not the only one, there's somebody else around who is forward-thinking. I don’t even like the term forward thinking because it's just normal thinking.

Although there are a lot of people who are one-sided and refuse to see the world any other way, the Up North Pride logo is a symbol that there are safe people.”

INTERVIEWER:

“How did you become involved in Up North Pride and what was the evolution that led to your being on the board and carrying the Pride merchandise at your stores?”  

KAREN:

“I became friends with the group's founder during the Apogee days when I saw a small group of people walking down Front Street with Up North Pride signs for their first Pride March, and I wanted to know more about it and got acquainted with everyone involved.

I was just a person supporting my people. As Up North Pride grew, I’d attend their events and see them selling their t-shirts and I saw an opportunity to help them organize their stock and use my retail experience to source the materials and house their merch in my store. After COVID happened, the board was down to only a couple of people and they wanted to rebuild their team and expand.

They reached out to me and asked me to join the board, so I started thinking about what I could bring to the table and it worked out for me to handle their merchandise in a way that provided them with funding. You need money to do good things.

I knew that I could sell hats, socks, hoodies, and stickers in my store and have a full range of branded pieces with the profits going towards funding UNP. My Secret Stash became the Mothership. I think it's important to be of service, however you can, and use what you have to get the job done.”

INTERVIEWER:

“What is the meaning of community to you? You’re the merchandise chair for Up North Pride, you’re heavily involved with the DDA (Traverse City Downtown Development Authority), and hosting or participating in events and pop-ups in our store and neighborhood, which all require high levels of strategic focus. Even the little things, such as shoveling our sidewalks in front of our store, are important. You make sure the parking meters are clear, and that we shovel to the end of our block so we’re being good neighbors—that’s top-to-bottom virtue.” 

KAREN:

“It makes me happy to let my able body help my community, and I'm hoping it's making others want to do the same—that it's contagious. I feel like when people see you doing nice things they'll want to do the same, or at least they’ll appreciate the gesture. 

If my sidewalks are clean, you’ll feel safe to walk by without slipping and breaking a hip, and hopefully, you'll want to come shopping. Maybe that’s a selfish act because I want you to come to my store, but I think if you're just a good human, then that benefits everybody—we all win together, everybody rises. I keep it simple—the small acts are the same practices I use for the big stuff. If I can help someone or a group of people to help themselves and, by extension, others, that’s the goal. And here we are.”

INTERVIEWER:

“I feel like the little things turn out to be the most important in the end, right? And caring about your neighborhood people, who are directly supporting local artists and the business overall. In this city, people make it a priority to ‘support local.’

We have our little community within a community here. We have people we call ‘friends of the store’ who stop by to see us, and we enjoy making people feel at ease. It’s had that energy since I came in last year with some of my Grand Rapids friends. You came right up to us and chatted with me like we’d known each other for years, and before we left you said to me, ’You look like you should work here, what’s your situation?’ That whole exchange was such a vibe and it just clicked that this is where I wanted to be. Fast-forward to now, I love coming to work every day. I feel like I can make a meaningful impact here while doing numerous, contrasting projects that make me feel fulfilled. We work hard, play hard, and love big. For me, this job is part of the missing link I’ve been searching for and I have a lot of gratitude for it. You created this space, and that's pretty special, so thank you, truly.”

KAREN:

“I love you guys, I love my people. I care about you all and try to make sure you all feel supported in my space. I care about all the vendors and artists we support by having their work in our store. I care about micro-businesses and the village it takes to keep them in the game. When the government refers to small business, that’s quantified by less than $5 million in revenue for the year, and I'm way under that. I’m one step above working at the kitchen table. Makers usually start creating at home while figuring out logistics for selling at art shows, street fairs, farmer's markets, and all the pop-up situations; some might eventually start a physical store, but not all.

I started my store at the kitchen table, but I had enough retail and management experience behind me to make the leap with more assurance and more weight behind me than some people. So, over the years I've helped more than 60 micro-businesses get off their kitchen table into the next phase, coaching and mentoring, starting conversations about what people want to do next, and figuring out how to get there. It can be scary and overwhelming to do on your own, and there’s a fear of being taken advantage of when you’re looking for guidance.

These conversations turn into businesses started by local people, so the money generated stays local and infuses our community with diverse and unique establishments so that our city stays interesting and not a series of cookie-cutter, corporate chains.

In that model, we're buying groceries, we're going out to lunch and dinner, we're socializing over drinks, we're going to the dentist, we're putting money into local entities. We’re just people living here and going about our lives sustaining our local economy.

Now, if you’re working at Walmart as an example, yes, you take your paycheck and spend it locally, but Walmart is not spending its revenue locally.

Granted they do have funds set aside for community outreach, which is still something, and they do a decent job as far as a larger corporation so I'm not slamming the Walton family. However, people like that with access and resources do not connect or have anything in common with normal people. They're getting bigger, fancier, and fatter at the expense of other people. But that’s America for you. I can’t really blame them for carrying on their business as usual. I’m more interested in figuring out how we can help each other directly, and if someone can benefit and grow in our local economy, we are all richer for it.”

INTERVIEWER:

I’ve found it’s sometimes easier to help people figure out their path and solve their problems than it is to do the same for yourself. Maybe that’s an ADHD thing, maybe it’s a human thing. Whatever the reason, that tendency stems from wanting to be of service, so I look at that quality as a superpower.

I think that people my age need to do better with providing guidance without personal gain or agenda—it seems like that sort of counsel is served forth more readily by more senior individuals, though maybe that’s the concept of generativity taking form in real-time that people my age and younger just don’t understand yet.

Not in a doom-and-gloom way, but just by a statement of relative life experience, the world seems to be in a heightened state of crazy right now. What advice can you share about how to handle and navigate this world—how to not be crushed and instead keep moving forward and hopefully thrive?”

KAREN: 

“Not to sound ‘woo-woo,’ but I think your generation has lost touch with manifesting. Meaning, that it doesn’t matter what’s going on, you have to find the place within yourself to center and focus on what you want. The world has always been crazy, every generation just gets its unique brand of crazy to deal with. You have to figure out how to create a life worth living and to help yourself and others even when the world is on fire.

In modern history, you can pick any decade within the last 100 years, there have always been wars, there's always been genocide, there's always political and civil unrest, there's always been somebody taking advantage of a system—nothing is new. Everything is amplified, I’ll give you that, but what’s happening now is recycled from history. 

Younger people have to get away from dependence on social media especially in the digital age of comparison and misinformation and quit worrying about what everybody else is thinking. It's so much more beneficial to concern yourself with what you can do directly. Find motivated, empowered people, don’t be afraid to have tough conversations, and don’t stay insulated in your own group, get everyone together. There’s way too much in-fighting now. That’s where it all falls off the rails, and then nothing gets done. Just more of the same, which I think is partially how we ended up in our current situation. We don’t all have to be friends or agree, that’s not going to happen—if we can get to a place where we cut the bullshit and seek to understand, then maybe we’ll be okay. However, to do that, you have to be willing to leave your comfort zone and get a little messy. Change isn’t supposed to be comfortable, okay? This is the tough-love Gen X Mama energy speaking. I’ll give you a big hug and give you a space to get your feelings out, but then I’m gonna bring you back into the reality that we have work to do, and we have to keep pushing forward.”

INTERVIEWER:

“I admire the hard-bitten honesty and acceptance of reality from Gen-X. It’s like unity and punk and there’s also no excuses—it's an enduring attitude that bridges the gap and accepts the good alongside the bad and the ugly, just leaning into it.

Your perspective is a delightful combination of rebel and existentialist optimism, which I feel so close to. I try not to be a complainer and I certainly don’t feel like the world owes me anything or is set up to cater to my needs. It has never been that way, regardless of the human desire for what should be.”

KAREN:

“You get it, then. I'm not going to just sit around taking it, or accepting excuses because whatever is happening in the world cannot be allowed to cause anxiety that then causes your life to come to a grinding halt. What good does that do for you? Get past your anxiety. Yes, let it happen, talk about it, absorb it, accept it, and then let it go so you can keep being a fantastic, little crazy diamond.

In every generation, there are the grandparents, parents, and kids—in whatever iteration. The grandparents come off as uptight but wise, the parents try to be better for their kids than their parents were, and then the kids rebel against authority anyway. That hasn’t changed, likely won’t change, and probably shouldn’t change.

What I like that I’m seeing more of now, is people starting to identify toxic, generational behaviors that are not being accepted any longer, and younger people are breaking cycles and rewriting the script so that they can be better and do better for their themselves, their kids, and everyone around them.

I’ve seen how that behavior changes and evolves, and your generation is just starting to be of the age where you realize you’ve taken that next step and are making changes too. You guys are showing the rest of us how to care and be compassionate, and I think that’s awesome.”

END OF PART 1 

INTERMISSION

Recorded, Written, and Edited by C. Thompson for Third Chapter Curious, LLC, 2025