The Yellow Shop

72 hours of spreading joy.

My friend Marnie Gelfman is like a walking rainbow. Always sporting vivid clothes and the queen of setting a colorful table — some I’ve been blessed to sit at.

So what a happy surprise when Marnie’s Instagram erupted for 3 days with a pop-up shop she created on Martha’s Vineyard called The Yellow Shop.

Filled with paintings and products in every hue of yellow, the shop was designed to elicit joy with little bits of sunshine you could take home:

☀️ Rubber duckies
🎨 Framed watercolors
🌻 Beatles T-shirts
🙂 Smiley face items
😎 Silly sunglasses
🍋 Vintage jewelry + dishes/glassware
⛱️ Beach items
🖼️ Home décor

Every Instagram post made me smile with its whimsy.

And I just had to reach out to learn more. Here’s what I found out when Marnie and I chatted:

• people loved it. Customers happily posed for photos and some came back more than once during its 3-day run

• it was less a retail launch and more of an experiment in spreading joy (“how do you bring a feeling to people?”)

• the time and space constraints (no nails could be put into the walls) led to novel solutions and a spirit of trial and error

• inspired by an installation on childhood Marnie did while at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

• possibly will iterate into a NYC yellow dinner party with live dance or poetry

• acoustics: a playlist with songs about sunshine or the color yellow

What I love about this is how open-ended the creative brief was.

OBJECTIVE: to spread joy and help people unleash their inner child.

Nothing to scale or monetize.
No downloads or passwords.
Just wander in and play for a bit.

Underthink it.

When you’ve got 72 hours, you can’t gum it up with perfectionism. You’ve just gotta follow impulses and see what happens. I needed this lesson. I tend to overthink things, draining all the colors from the rainbow like a reverse magic trick.

Doors that open into joy.

I shared with Marnie that her yellow shop triggered a recent memory for me. When visiting a lovely little stationery shop in Summit, NJ, I found myself tearing up.

Why?

Because it reminded me of a jewel box of a stationery store in Carmel that my Dad and I used to visit together. A pale blue Dutch door. Rows upon rows of letterpress cards. Sealing wax. Fountain pens.

As a girl who had international penpals (anyone remember The Big Blue Marble?), I swoon over stationery. Now that my Dad has passed away, I don’t visit this shop anymore. But my heart remembers. In an era when shopping happens mostly from phones, window shopping is a cherished (endangered?) past-time.

Which store has been a portal for you? What feeling did you leave with?

Until next time, remember that creativity knows no bounds.

P.S. Francophile extra trivia: Marnie is short for Marguerite, which means daisy. Yellow is literally in her signature.