Lori Frank’s life was changed by a can of paint.
It was a Friday afternoon just before Christmas and Frank was heading west on Bloomfield Avenue to the Home Depot in Fairfield. As she passed Everything Dance, a small store by the entrance to Calandra’s Italian Village in Caldwell, she noticed people hanging a “Store Closing” sign. “Oh no,” Frank recalls thinking, “I’ve always loved that place.”
Most of us would have had our moment of nostalgia and kept on driving. But Frank turned her car around and went back to the store. Before she knew it, Frank found herself asking what it would take to keep Everything Dance open.
“Then I went to Home Depot and got my paint,” says Frank. “On Saturday, I came back to Everything Dance and made an offer to buy it. On Sunday, they accepted. And on Monday, I left corporate America.”
Her life since then has been just as much of a whirlwind. She convinced her family to celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, the whole clan–her husband Nick and children Austin and Olivia–went to the store and gave it a fresh coat of bright pink paint. Frank channeled the 20 years she had spent in senior positions with Macy’s, Liz Claiborne, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike’s Converse brand into a new layout for the merchandise. She channeled her experience as the mother of a competitive dancer into an expanded selection for ballet, tap, lyrical, contemporary, modern, hip-hop and jazz dancers, as well as dance-themed gifts. Everything Dance, indeed.
So now, instead of a daily commute to New York or near weekly business trips by plane, Frank travels just 1.7 miles from her home in Verona to a place she calls her “happy pink bubble.”
“I can apply my entire career to this boutique,” says Frank, like her yearly attendance at Nike Merchandising University. “You’ve got to have the right product at the right time.”
That means new brands, like California Kisses, Sugar and Bruno, and Gia Mia. As for the “right time”, Frank now travels to Olivia’s dance competitions with a bag full of tights, footwear, hair accessories–and her Apple Pay set-up. There are at least a dozen competitive dance studios in our area and Frank knows that many dance moms are juggling intense practices, families and full-time jobs. If she doesn’t catch them at competitions, they will find their way to the store. “They can come here and take care of everything in one trip,” she says.
While Frank says she always wanted to own her own shop, she admits that a corporate job–with its steady salary, benefits and perks–is a hard thing to walk away from.
“But,” she says firmly, “you can’t put a price on happiness.”
Everything Dance
242 Bloomfield Ave, Caldwell, NJ 07006
Phone: (973) 618 – 9911
Tuesday-Thursday: 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
Friday: 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday: 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Closed Sunday & Monday
