Cattails’ new owner is no stranger to retail business
By Jim Smedley
Staff Writer

NORWAY – To Jennifer McPhee, nothing could have been more natural than becoming the owner of Cattails gift shop.

She has spent a great deal of her life in retail stores.

When she was 5, she and her 7-year-old sister would spend afternoons at a children’s clothing store in Rumford. Their grandmother Adeline McPhee owned the Youth Colony.

“We’d stay in the back office and take naps,” said McPhee, now 31.

During high school she would work part-time at Bartash’s gift shop in Rumford.

John Bartash owned that store, as well as Cattails.

After high school McPhee went to Castleton College in Vermont and worked at Bartash’s in the summer. After graduating in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in history she worked full-time for Bartash’s for two years.

McPhee then left for a job in Portland for a year and returned to the gift shop life when she accepted a management position at Cattails in 1997. She had been manager until April 1, when she bought the store.

She said she was going to keep many of the same lines such as Yankee Candle, Monroe Saltworks (pottery), Boyd’s Bears (stuffed animals) and Stonewall Kitchen (specialty foods) and add a couple of new ones.

McPhee said she has some cosmetic changes in mind, but nothing too dramatic.

“It will be the same gift shop,” McPhee said. “People won’t walk in and not know where they are.”

There will still be one full-time employee and two part-time employees.

But there will be a difference.

“I’ll be here six days a week versus five,” she said. “It’s different. Now, I’m a clerk, buyer, manager and owner.

“I have to pay the bills now,” she said.

jsmedley@sunjournal.com