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Art Cafe creates family experience with pottery
By Kalea Hall
BOARDMAN
Eva Popovec is a mother, grandmother and business owner.
She’s also a force to be reckoned with.
She never stops wearing a smile even when she talks about rough patches in her life.
She walks around to the tables inside her store, The Art Cafe Ohio, inside Southern Park Mall and eagerly helps customers learn the process of making painting a pottery piece.
“When you believe in a dream and a concept you just go for it,” Eva said.
Go for it she did.
Popovec is a native of Celaya, Mexico. She came to the U.S. in the late 1980s and settled in the Mahoning Valley with her then-husband who’s from here.
Popovec knew little English when she arrived, but she learned. And with her degree in business from the Universidad de Celaya she got a job at a bank.
“I became a mom,” she said. “I was able to juggle being a mom and a teller for about 10 years.”
When her three daughters – Jackie, Michelle and Allison Popovec – got older she worked retail.
And then a rough patch came.
Once Eva got divorced, she realized she could no longer support her family with jobs that only paid $10 to $12 per hour.
“I needed to create a job,” she said. “When I got divorced ... here I am putting three girls through high school. I am thinking, how am I going to get through this? In life you do what you need to do. You start researching.”
She remembered her family vacations to Hilton Head Island and how much her girls loved painting pottery.
“I started looking at this as a business opportunity,” she said. “I decided this could be something we can do as a family.”
Her research led her to open The Art Cafe Ohio in August 2012 with the support of her family and the Small Business Development Center at Youngstown State University. She chose to start in the mall because she knew she had to be where the people are.
“We want to entice the customers,” she said. “I want you to wonder about who we are. That’s all we want. This is a good thing here. We aren’t just selling pottery. We are selling an experience.”
Intrigue from customers turned to sales. Customers walked by the store, saw the shelves of unpainted pottery – from owls to Christmas trees – next to shiny, finished pieces and they had to explore.
Recently, the store relocated to a new spot in the mall in the JCPenney concourse.
“I really needed the space,” Eva said. “This is something [the mall] offered to me. We did it, and we couldn’t be happier.”
Eva feels blessed to be able to come to work seven days a week. She treats her customers like family, which is probably why the shop feels like home to many of the families who come in and spend sometimes four, five or even seven hours making their art.
Right now, the store is bustling with holiday spirit. Families come in, find the perfect pieces for each family member, wash off the pottery and start painting. Once finished, the pottery piece dries in the back of the shop before it goes into the kiln and comes to life.
The shop also has a station to make mosaics.
The hot-selling item right now are platters with handprints of the entire family.
“They have this sentiment,” Eva said. “Who would have thought that a piece of pottery would become a keepsake?”
But the families inside Eva’s shops aren’t just creating pottery or mosaics, they are creating memories, and that’s what makes this business special for Eva and her three daughters, who are really the inspiration behind the business.
Jackie, 25, a singer and songwriter known around the Mahoning Valley as lead singer for the local band The Vindys, is an artist at the shop.
Michelle, 23, a mom and biology student at Youngstown State University, is also an artist.
Allison, 21, a health sciences student at Ohio State University, is the sales person at the shop when she’s in town.
From the beginning, Eva’s daughters helped to grow the business.
“We loved the concept forever,” Michelle said.
“Because of the risk she was taking I was concerned at first,” Jackie added.
But the concern went away as the business came.
“My mom is a very business-minded person, and she saw a need in the community,” Allison said.
Eva says she’s not an artist, just a person who had a dream, the know-how and the belief in herself to make her business a successful reality.
“She’s all about the evolution of this place,” Jackie said.
For information on The Art Cafe go to: theartcafeohio.com.