It Was Magic

Former State Street business owner Janice Durand has written a memoir that will keep you turning pages whether or not you care about the ups and downs of small businesses or of State Street. It’s a book that will capture your interest if you care about life, which makes it appealing to a fairly broad audience. 

For three decades, Durand owned The Puzzle Box, which was more than a toy store for kids, on upper State Street. Her book, The Magic Hour: A Very Personal History of State Street (Little Creek Press), recounts how she became a more-or-less accidental small business owner, built that business into a startling success and then navigated changes in the economy that undercut her business and challenges in her personal life that made it all so much more complicated. 

If you were in Madison in the late 1980s and 90s you will no doubt remember Durand’s store windows, featuring teddy bears doing all sorts of Madison stuff — attending a concert, sunning themselves at a beach, attending a UW football game. 

That was all an accident. As a rookie store owner she ordered what she thought were a couple of very expensive bears, which she thought were too pricey to sell in any volume, from a vendor. It turned out she had ordered a couple of cartons of those bears, tying up a lot of her capital when she had very little. But a designer friend came up with an idea: stuff the store’s State Street window with a bevy of bears enjoying a program at the Civic Center, just about to open across the street. 

The display was so captivating that Durand had a hard time keeping the bears in stock — and her window full of them. And the rest is history. History and a lot of hard work and risk-taking. That spark of creativity between Durand and her supporting cast carried over into the store. She had a knack for finding fun items that appealed to her Madison customers and to a comfortable middle-class clientele from around the region. 

She credits her years of success with a booming national economy in the 1980s, a relatively recession-proof Madison economy and a desire on the part of baby boomers for toys that were creative, unusual and in tune with their values. She never carried toy guns or other items that glorified violence. 

Durand’s success was noticed by a Boston development group looking for the right retailers for its new Grand Avenue project in Milwaukee. Durand was hesitant to add a store, but she eventually took the risk and repeated her success there. She later expanded to St. Louis and opened a second store in Milwaukee. 

But with growth came challenges both professionally and personally. Her marriage, already bumpy, disintegrated. And her now far-flung small empire stretched her to the limit. Eventually she needed to part ways with long-time employees who weren’t able to make the transition to more responsible positions, but who later did find their own success in other ventures. 

And then the economy changed. While the Madison store continued to do well, recessions took their toll in Milwaukee and St. Louis. And more free trade with China put downward pressure on prices. Finally, her base customers became more willing to shop at big box retailers just as the nature of State Street was transforming to focus on restaurants and bars which could generate higher rents. 

All of those pressures chased Durand deeper into her nightly glasses of wine. A problem she deals with frankly in her book. Eventually, she stopped drinking altogether. 

In the end Durand closed her toy stores, but opened Little Luxuries, also on State Street, which appealed to a more stable niche clientele and which remains in business today under a protege. 

In reading her book, which I found hard to put down, I found myself thinking about small business as a creative endeavor. Durand didn’t care that much about making money beyond what she needed to support herself, her loyal employees and her family. Financial success was more or less an afterthought. What she really loved was creating the joy of discovery in her store and curating it with things that appealed to her own tastes and values. 

For a while — the years she describes as the “magic hour” — those tastes and values matched up perfectly with the vibe of Madison. Durand wasn’t just a small business owner. She was an inspiration to young women entrepreneurs, to people who believed in funky local retail streets and to those who cared about how kids played and what that play would teach them about life. 

And now, through her excellent book, she is all those things again. 

A version of this piece originally appeared in Isthmus.