A great gift shop is an experience, a little retail museum of the current cultural zeitgeist. The best ones are curated by people of exquisite, free-range taste and a grasp of how people actually like to live, and the sweet Village of Catskill has just had a great gift shop land in its midst. Stay Forever is the kind of gift shop that’s hard to leave without grabbing just a wee treat for yourself as well, be it artisanal seasonings, a chocolate cake candle and a book of incense matches, or a Baby Dino triceratops set to dress up your favorite toddler.
Co-owners Michelle Delgado and Lisa Jee held their official ribbon cutting on August 22 but were already welcoming the curious even as they unpacked and got organized. “It’s been great fun to see what people are gravitating toward, and what brands they haven’t seen before,” says Delgado. “We’ve been encouraging them to come on in, see what’s here, and go tell their friends. It’s been really validating, especially because we know about a bunch of stuff that isn’t even here yet but that they’re going to absolutely love.”
Stay Forever offers all the classic gift shop categories—beauty and wellness, home goods, accessories, stationery and cards, kids toys—but the items in each include some that are decidedly eclectic. Under the paper goods umbrella, for example, you’ll find a little mini-notebook with googly eyes. There are keychains dangling sticks of butter, sardine tins and overripe bananas, and one that mimics a Chinese fortune cookie slip predicting “You will have a better day if you just stay home.” Food choices include Moonstruck chocolate bars, pocket tins of infused salts in assorted flavors, and hatch green chile cheddar Soberdough bread mix. There’s a Dilo unisex eau de parfum and Kristina Micotte Wild Cats men’s crew socks. In every category, the choices lean into indie makers and showcase more than a bit of sass.
Delgado, who used to work with Etsy on a program that aimed to help online sellers cross over to brick-and-mortar retail, and Jee, the onetime creative director for Manhattan’s iconic Strand Bookstore, are natives of Ridgewood, Queens. The pair were friendly acquaintances before they bonded further over the experience of being pregnant without paid maternity to look forward to. “It started with joking around about how we should just work for ourselves, since we’d have to pay for childcare otherwise. A couple of weeks after we started this fantasy conversation about taking the babies to work, we scraped together our savings and signed a lease,” says Delgado of the flagship Stay Forever store in Queens. “We went to SCORE (the Service Corps of Retired Executives) for some small business advice and they said, ‘You’re supposed to have a business plan before you sign a lease,’ and we said, ‘oh well, we’re doing it backwards’.”
Backwards or not, they’re doing it well—their Ridgewood shop, which opened in 2018 when the babies were three and seven months old, has dozens of five-star raves from shoppers on Google who praise the eclectic selection, quality, and friendly staff. “They just grew up in a playpen next to the register, learning to greet the customers,” says Delgado of their kids, now elementary schoolers. “They’re up here ‘helping’—we’ve got them pricing games and stuff, but of course they’re mostly trying to convince us to take things home.”
As the daughters grew, so did Stay Forever’s selection of baby and kid stuff, a process that led to the opening of a second Ridgewood store, Forever Young. The decision to open a Catskill outpost came when Stay Forever’s bookkeeper, who’d been running a shop at 397 Main Street there, wanted to go back to full-time bookkeeping. “She jokingly asked if we’d like to take over the spot, so we came and looked around and fell in love with the place. Here we are,” says Delgado. “We walked all over town before we made the decision, to make sure we’d be bringing in something that wasn’t already here.”
Stay Forever’s distinctive selection of gifts is sourced from a combination of local makers and Instagram discoveries. “Supporting our fellow small independent businesses is very important to us, and we discovered lots of great makers around Brooklyn and Queens,” says Delgado. “So a huge part of opening a retail store was keeping the relationships we built at Etsy and the Strand. We both had a lot of personal relationships with brilliant young makers, and it’s wonderful to have a platform for them. We don’t limit ourselves, but we do tend to lean toward women makers, especially BIPOC women—I’m Hispanic, Lisa is Asian. And our taste leans toward stuff that’s bright and uplifting, stuff that pops.” The Stay Forever selection of home goods, personal care items, accessories, toys for all ages, kitchenware and decor broad and deep; there are, for example, 284 choices broadly defined as “lifestyle” products and 79 jewelry options on the company website, all of which can be ordered if nothing in the physical store is just right.
With school soon to open in Queens, the team has hired capable local help to hold down the fort, but both say the dream might eventually include living in the Hudson Valley life full-time. In the nearer future, they’re hoping to bring in some kids’ classes and workshops at the Catskill store. “The ones we run in Queens are on the website, and people say they’re hoping it can happen here,” says Delgado. “So we’re looking for local musicians who’d enjoy running a kids’ class, because we know parents would love to have that locally and not have to drive to Kingston.”
Stay Forever Catskill is located at 397 Main Street; the company can be found online at shopstayforever.com.
