October officially marks Sightsee retail shop and coffee bar’s fourth year at its little downtown house on the corner of Line Street and Rose Lane. To celebrate its fourth anniversary, Sightsee is hosting a pop-up every Sunday this month, featuring local vendors like food pop-ups The Castejons and Batik as well as wine bar Graft’s Femi Oyediran.
Sightsee opened in 2019, with bright eyes full of hope and optimism, only to stumble upon the woes of the pandemic in 2020.
“In your first year in business, you’re so excited, so hopeful, and you’re doing everything you can to get the word out to try to get people to come in, particularly with coffee, where people try a new coffee spot and decide if it’s going to be a place that they frequent,” said co-owner Allyson Sutton.
Eight months prior to opening the spot on Line Street, Sightsee was just a little coffee cart, lugged around in the back of co-owner Joel Sadler’s station wagon. Sadler and Sutton hoped to combine an independent retail store with coffee to create a community where people could support locals, hang out and meet new people.
The pandemic reframed the way Sightsee “as an organism” interacts and supports its community, Sadler said. “Instead, it was less about what’s happening inside the shop, and much more about what’s happening outside the shop. We felt like there were things that we were in a position to take a stand on, publicly, that would be of value to the community.”
Now, post-pandemic, Sutton and Sadler feel they as people, and Sightsee as a business, have grown stronger, and more closely knit with the community they’ve built in the past four years.
“I feel like we got to experience 10 years of business in three years,” Sadler said. “It was like a decade’s worth of stressors all crammed into our very early days.”
With its four-year anniversary and all the challenges and triumphs Sightsee experienced since opening, the obvious question was, “What’s next?”
Come spring, Sightsee will permanently close its doors on Line Street, only to reopen shortly after at a brand-new location on the corner of Rutledge Avenue and Cleveland Street across from Hampton Park.
The corner-facing storefront will be three times the size of its current location with longer hours, more merch and retail items, coffee and drink offerings and grab-and-go food to snack on at the park.
“It’s just this living breathing thing that we created that has a really cool team and cool people in the community uplifting it all the time,” Sutton said. “And I never would have thought that would be the case.”
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