Cover Ups is Alaska’s small business of the year

PALMER — Mid-morning on Saturday, Teresa Roy apologizes to a visitor for making so much noise as she pulls a cart with extremely squeaky wheels through her showroom.

“Today just happens to be our Pallets and Planks show,” she said.

Roy, owner of Cover Ups in downtown Palmer, said that the show features furniture made from recycled and repurposed wood — a colorfully painted headboard, a similarly colorful coffee table.

Cover Ups started out as a shop selling blinds and curtains but has since expanded into a little bit of everything. Roy’s passion, though, is clearly with the furniture; giving new lives to old pieces, saving them from the landfill.

It’s also the winner of the 2012 Alaska State Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business of the Year award.

“I’m the first business that’s won in the Valley, and I’m the smallest business that’s won,” she said. “They consider a small business to be under 100 employees and I have one employee.”

The award, named after Bethel businessman Bill Bivin, has been given out every year since 1995, according to the Bethel Chamber of Commerce’s website. Any chamber in the state can nominate a member. In his nominating application, Greater Palmer Chamber of Commerce director Ralph Renzi cited her record of community service including:

• Roy’s yearly Christmastime cookie-decorating event

• Her help putting together a walking map of the city

• Her leadership at both the Palmer Economic Development Authority and the Downtown Merchants Association

Roy said she was grateful have won, even more so when she thinks about just how many competitors there were. Even in Palmer, she said, there’s stiff competition. To think that she was singled out for this recognition over, for example, Denise Statz at Non-Essentials, Roy said, is overwhelming.

“I am humbled that I was the one that got this award because there are so many deserving people,” she said.

Roy grew up in Anchorage but her family homestead in Sutton in 1949. She lives on the homestead, and her grandkids are now the fifth generation of her family to live there.

Though her roots in the Valley run deep, she said, her ties here were deepened 19 years ago when she went into business for herself.

“Small business gives a community its character, its sense of place,” she said. And small business people? “Usually they’re pursuing their passion. They certainly aren’t doing it for the money.”

Nine years ago Roy opened up her Palmer storefront shop. She sold just curtains and blinds then, and usually shared the space and cost of rent with other interior design businesses. She’d be partnered with a countertop business for a while or a flooring business.

Three years ago, when a water main under Alaska Street burst, sending a geyser into the air, businesses in downtown suffered. Some were moving on.

“That was a really scary time to be a business owner in downtown Palmer, because we so rely on each other,” she said.

Eventually, the business she was partnered with left.

“It was like, OK, it’s time to walk the walk,” she said.

And she did. She expanded into the furniture business. She started rehabilitating and selling pieces. And then she expanded next door, bringing on start-up companies that were in complimentary businesses and giving them space to grow.

Renzi, in his application, cites her work during this period rallying the local businesses to combat perceptions that business was dying downtown.

“A lighting event to be held the week prior to our upcoming Colony Christmas was planned. The working title: The Lights ARE on. Owner Teresa Roy created a committee… They encouraged all the small shops along Palmer’s main streets to go all out with decorations, especially lights,” Renzi wrote. “The Sunday before Colony Christmas the town lit up! There was no doubt that the ‘lights were on’ in Palmer.”

Over the next couple years, she said, she grew 400 percent. Which is all the more remarkable when you consider what was going on in her personal life.

Her landlord had given her until Nov. 1, 2010, to get the place set up. But on Oct. 26 of that year her oldest son was arrested on charges that eventually saw him sentenced to 30 years in prison.

All of a sudden, in addition to expanding the business, she was navigating unfamiliar and bewildering bureaucracies both in the prison system and at the state’s Office of Children Services, which placed her grandchildren in foster care.

She said very few people downtown knew about any of that. She still doesn’t want to discuss her son’s case beyond the barest of details.

“It’s not that I’m ashamed of it,” she said. “it’s that I never wanted to give myself a reason to say ‘I’m not coming into work today.’ There are people I rely on in this community and I am relied upon.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com o352-2270.