Help build our new E-Town store

A customer adding to our sticker post.

It was a sprint from the March 9 epiphany that I should give serious thought to relocating our store to Elizabethtown to opening the doors there for the first time on June 17.

One hundred days, to be exact.

I don’t think a day went by without my pondering some aspect of the move. As much as we loved our Hershey store, we didn’t merely want to reproduce it in E-Town. While the stores don’t vary much in size, they feel very different.

This was an opportunity to refine the store’s aesthetics, to take advantage of the higher ceiling and increased natural light while contending with new challenges, including angled walls that don’t go to the ceiling and the presence of two water coolers.

Credit my son, Jack, who encouraged me to embrace the water coolers. Hence the addition of a felt banner above them that reads, “E-Town Drinking Club.”

I fretted over every inch of the space, rationalizing every piece and challenging a predilection I have for cool old stuff (hello, newspaper box) that sometimes made the Hershey store feel more like a museum than a retail shop.

Now it’s time to let the store breathe for a while, to see how customers interact with what we’ve started. But I hope you'll indulge a little nudging because we've created two interactive features that I hope customers will embrace.

Sticker post

Instead of buying another piece of décor, we created one: a place where customers could share stickers from their travels.

It fit our brand — we've always described Stay as "a brand of place" — while giving customers a sense of ownership in the store.

We clad one of the space’s support posts in plywood and affixed our own sticker that reads, “Places You’ve Been.” To seed this project, I asked my sister, Lisa, to send me a sticker from her anniversary trip to Asheville, N.C.

We have room for lots more stickers. Wherever your travels take you, we hope you'll bring us back a sticker to add to the collection.

‘Your E-Town’ wall

The water fountains reside on a wall covered in gray corrugated metal. We couldn’t screw into the metal, but we could display things using magnets. But what?

I’m eager to learn E-Town history, and one way to expedite the process is to ask customers to share a photo, postcard or other memory (ticket stub, brochure, newspaper clipping) of this community.

To set the stage, I purchased on eBay a couple of old postcards, a waxed paper bag from the long-defunct Elizabethtown Bakery, and a 1933 letter sent to an ailing co-worker at the Klein Chocolate Co. (now Mars).

I hope the presence of those items on the wall will inspire customers to dig into their own archives and help tell the story of E-Town.

Whether it’s a sticker from a recent trip or a memory from long ago, we hope you’ll share it and help build our store.