The Art of Business

Four Winds

By Josh Ripps

To most people, Indonesia is thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world, and its culture is perhaps double that distance. Yet for about a year and a half, the residents of Stone Ridge, in somewhat of a clandestine manner, have been purchasing the country’s most intriguing handmade furniture from a retail store just a stone’s throw from their front porch.
That store is Four Winds, and it exists for only one simple reason: Its owners, Cindy and Patrick Sweeny, have a passion, if you will, for traveling. “I’ve always wanted to get paid to travel,” said Cindy. Her husband Patrick was sitting nearby in one of their white-cushioned teak chairs. He beamed about how their profession allows them to go on six-week to two-month buying trips to Indonesia and that he and Cindy have made four such trips within the past 18 months since the store has been open. And Patrick or Cindy—if not both of them—are always present on these trips, since they hand-pick all their merchandise.

Each buying trip follows a bare-bones agenda. First, Patrick and Cindy trek throughout Indonesia—sifting its merchandise—for staple items such as coffee tables, rugs and solid-teak dining room tables. Those have proven to be the store’s best sellers. They also make rounds to the many fabricators they know in order to distinguish the best vendor to fulfill a particular request their customers made back home.

“Then we go on a treasure hunt,” Patrick voiced in his consistently soft tone. It is on these “treasure hunts,” they both agree, where the fun intensifies. During this time they amass any random piece of furniture that catches their eyes. Only they usually run into one problem: not everything fits in the 40-foot container they ship back to the United States. So to compromise, they take photographs of the remaining pieces and add it to the book they keep available for their customers to browse.

Since the length of each trip is so long, Patrick and Cindy depend on full-time employee Lindsey Ross, and part-time employee Miya Buxton, to run the store in their absence. “It’s actually pretty easy,” said Ross. “While they’re gone, the most important thing is to keep up with the clients’ orders.”

Ross is referring to orders that are placed prior to Patrick and Cindy leaving the country. Basically, Ross maintains the communication while Patrick and Cindy are “treasure hunting” on the other side of the globe. This process involves a plethora of e-mails sent back-and-forth that include a piece’s dimensions, wood-type or other necessary details. This process proved to be a successful medium for Patrick and Cindy, who really are quite new to the furniture business.
Prior to Four Winds, the two sold Indonesian dresses at various colleges, concerts and fairs. But after a while that trade started to become tiresome and caused them to seek other options. “We were doing about two festivals a weekend,” Cindy said. “One of us had one kid with us and the other had the other,” she said of their two children, Jashua, 7, and Sean, 3. “And we wanted to be more centered with our children and the store was that solution.”

So they opened Four Winds, which carries products not only from Indonesia, but from Thailand and local craftspeople as well. And in the near future they will carry products from Vietnam, simply because Patrick and Cindy will get to go there. “That’s why we’ve always done what we’ve done,” said Cindy, “to travel.”

Four Winds is located at 3656 Main St., in Stone Ridge. It’s open from 10 AM to 6 PM during the week and 10 AM to 7 PM on weekends. For more information, call the store at 687-4080.