Mama Llama’s has surprising back story

Mama Llama’s opened its doors in Washington late last summer, but if you had asked owner Karisa Mellinger about the boutique in June, she would have been confused. Up until July, in fact, her family had no plans to live anywhere near Washington.

“We weren’t planning on moving back at all,” she said. “I was here for the summer with the kids, hanging out with my in-laws and my parents, and it was actually fair week. My husband called and he said, ‘Hey, I got laid off.’”

The family planned to spend the summer at their cabin in Coppock while figuring things out. Shortly after, a relative invited her husband to a job interview. By the end of the day on Wednesday, he was hired, starting Monday the next week.

Mellinger said the family had very limited time to bring their lives from North Dakota back to Washington.

“We go to North Dakota Wednesday night, we get there Thursday morning at 6 a.m., we pack all of our stuff, we sell probably three trailers, we sold our house, all in under 72 hours,” she said. “By Monday morning, we were back here. So we were definitely not planning any of that, it was a lot to wrap our head around.”

The process was a blur.

“We slept for three hours, and then we got up and packed every sentimental thing we knew we wanted to keep,” she said. “Everything else, we pretty much opened our house and said, ‘OK, it’s a garage sale.’ I literally have no idea how it happened as fast as it did. It just happened so fast, it was crazy.”

While the departure was abrupt, Mellinger said it was a clearly positive change in locale.

“We were ready to leave North Dakota,” she said. “It was time, we wanted the support system from our family … with our six kids, we were just ready to get back, so we decided to jump on this chance while we could take it.”

Even as they moved back, the plan for a boutique had not yet materialized. Mellinger had run Mama Llama’s as an exclusively online store before, but it had been nearly a year since she devoted any energy to it, with no inventory left and a recently born baby.

When she considered opening a brick and mortar location in Washington, she toured one location, but didn’t love it. While another spot was up for lease on the square, acquiring it seemed unlikely until the last second.

“We called the landlords,” she said. “They gave me those whole spiel … I thought they were going to brush me off. The next morning, at 7 a.m., he called me first thing in the morning, and said, ‘We want you to come see the building. We don’t like what the other prospects would be selling and they would be from out of town. We would like to get somebody local.”

Mellinger said she fell in love as soon as she walked into the space.

Like the move from North Dakota, setting up the store was a mad dash.

“I ordered all of my inventory, my 12-year old and my 5-year-olds painted the whole building with me,” she said. “There was a handful of people that I had help from, and we got it done in 30 days … I already had the infrastructure in place from being online. I already had a website, I already had my bar code system done.”

With the lightning-fast turnaround time out of the way, Mellinger said she couldn’t be happier with how things had turned out.

“We had been waiting for this day for our stars to align to move back to Washington,” she said. “The fact that the store front was available … and a good job for him back here, everything just fell correct. To me, it was the biggest blessing we’ve ever had. I do not know how it all worked out like it did.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com