Local businesses sold food, drinks, plants and clothes at recent event on Olive Drive
By RORY CONLON — rhconlon@ucdavis.edu
Volt Coffee, Tea & Taps hosted their first “Small Business Sundays” event in collaboration with The Growing Groves Plant Shop, Yesterday Vintage and Guads Tacos & Beer on Oct. 6. At the event, Davis community members could shop food, drinks, plants and clothes.
Jacqueline Siefker, a co-owner of Volt, organized the event to attract more customers from downtown Davis to Olive Drive where her shop is located.
“We’re off on the edge of town, and we feel a little less involved with the main part of downtown Davis,” Siefker said. “So I decided to reach out one day to Yesterday Vintage about doing an event with them and offering a little bit of something to our side of town.”
From there, Siefker worked with Donbi Kim, a co-owner of Yesterday Vintage, to expand the event. Kim said the process of planning the event took a couple of months.
“We had already known of [The] Growing Groves and are close friends with Lawrence [Groves], so we pitched it to him in person,” Kim said. “And then Guads was in the process of getting their vending license to sell their product [out of their food truck], and they just happened to have their first day of service yesterday. It came together perfectly.”
Kim and her co-owner, Michaela Landers, started Yesterday Vintage in October 2023 and recently hit their one-year anniversary of being open. Kim said the “Small Business Sundays” event provided an opportunity to display clothes that normally wouldn’t fit into their store.
“We took the $10 rack and the $5 bin out so we could extend the plus-size section that we have and make the section in the front more even,” Kim said. “We’ve been telling our customers that we will be bringing them back — it will just be at events like this.”
Rigo Hernandez, the co-owner of Guads Tacos & Beer, said the event provided his business an opportunity to gain exposure outside of their downtown location.
“We’re getting a good amount of people trying our food out that didn’t know that we were downtown and don’t really travel out that way,” Hernandez said. “It’s been a good turnout.”
Lawrence Groves, the co-owner of The Growing Groves Plant Shop, said the event forged a connection between the public and the small business community in Davis.
“Instead of a corporation having a million employees, you get to know the owners and interact with the people who so carefully curated their business specifically for you,” Groves said. “Also, it’s nice to interact and get feedback from everyone who visits the shop.”
Hernandez, who has run Guads for four years now, pointed to the comfort that small businesses can bring to customers.
“We’re a family-owned business, so we offer customers that homey vibe like their local mom-and-pop stores,” Hernandez said. “We greet them as if they are family and friends.”
Indiana Rivera, a fifth-year agricultural and environmental education major, attended the event because it was right down the street from where she lived. She said small businesses make better connections with customers.
“You get that small town vibe, having smaller businesses provide those services,” Rivera said. “You can create those connections within your community, rather than feel really disconnected from everyone by just getting the run-of-the-mill things from Walmart and Target.”
Olivia Elliott, a third-year geology major, attended the event with her sister and said she liked having multiple shops in one place.
“Bringing a bunch of different small businesses to one place is like a one-stop shop,” Elliott said. “Having them together is convenient and nice.”
Siefker expressed that she would like to bring in even more businesses from downtown, exploring events like evening markets and mini farmers markets. She reflected on how working in downtown coffee shops 10 years ago inspired her journey to start Volt in February of this year.
“When starting Volt, I wanted to pull all the good experiences and knowledge I gained from those shops,” Siefker said. “I think what separates us is that we really thrive off of the people that come in and we establish our own community [here] now. That’s the biggest thing for us.”
Written By: Rory Conlon — rhconlon@ucdavis.edu
