Nancy: I'm particularly interested in your story of how you became an independent businesswoman. Do you mind sharing some version of that with me?

Lori: So I moved to Laramie in 2001. We made a choice to move here from Southern California and wanted to live in a small community. I wanted to have the children have that kind of a life that I did in Southern California, so we chose Laramie to move here. And it's been a blessing ever since.

That was 2001. When we moved here, I was working for an attorney. I helped a lot of little startup businesses working with him, but he was the boss. It was always this creative process of starting a business. I learned a lot through that process. And then when we got here, I did a little bit of work for him, and it worked great, and then he decided to retire, so I got to be a mom for a couple years, and that was awesome. 

And we would meet at Grounds Coffee Shop. There was a group of women…we would meet on Fridays, just to get together and solve real problems. That’s what we women do when they gather. And it was just one of those things. My brain was kinda percolating, "I need to do something fun and creative." So we kinda had this percolation of an idea of a store. And it was just a fun collaboration. 

I knew…I've always worked for small businesses, and I knew--I started my first job at an  independent variety store--that I didn't want to work for a corporation. So I think I knew that very early. I've always worked for small businesses. In 2005, the original store was called In Sheep's Clothing. It was just one of those things, how it work out, serendipity.

It was just a Godshot how quickly it all happened, and it all worked. We opened up at the end of April 2005, and we were at the space…Well, I'm just gonna tell you the story of what  happened:

We lived in your neighborhood, and we had a cat named Tigger. He ended up not coming home on a Friday night. And that Saturday, we got a knock on the door, and it was a neighborhood kid. He goes, "Are you missing a cat?" And we said, "Yes." And he goes, "Oh, he's on the Anderson's roof." Oh. So the lived down off of Overland [another street in the neighborhood] and so, at first, it was just one of those things that's like, "Oh, well, he'll come down."

But then, I'm like, "No, he has pneumonia. We need to get him down," and this was in February. So the Andersons had this amazing slate roof, and Tigger was scared. He wasn't coming down, and he had been up there since Friday night. 

So we had a neighbor who worked for a utilities company and who had bucket lifts. And my daughter, Grace, said "Mr. So-and-So, can you help me get the cat down?" (Even though it was my other daughter's cat!) So anyhow, he got the bucket lifts on both sides of their property, and he got a staff member to go up and grab Tigger.

That's how we met the Andersons, who owned the Chocolate Cellar [in Laramie].

A couple days later, we came downtown to say thank you and bought some chocolates. And Christie Anderson said, "Oh, by the way, my neighbor next door [here in the downtown shops] is moving out. Wouldn't it be nice to have a yarn store in that space?" And so I was like, "Oh! This is the right energy. It’s out there to the world! It’s happening!” So I talked to my then-partner, and that was around Valentine's Day, February 2005. And just the whole Godshot--how it was meant to be--we [Cowgirl Yarn] opened up at the end of April.