Local Boutique Takes St. Stephen on a Kindness Spree
ST. STEPHEN — ‘Be Good to People For No Good Reason’ may not be as famous as Versace or Louis Vuitton, but for a small town in southern New Brunswick, it’s a design that packs a big emotional punch.
“I felt all the feels with this one,” says Kristan Cloney, the co-owner of Spree, a boutique located in St. Stephen.
Cloney is a former teacher who runs the décor and clothing shop with her mom. She says she wanted to devote some of her time and energy at the retail level to making a positive impact on the community.
“I wanted to stand on the rooftop and celebrate this one because I was just so proud of how we all came together and what we were able to accomplish.”
The accomplishment took even Cloney by surprise. Starting with a modest goal of raising $500 for a student who embraced the ethos of kindness, the Kindness Spree Campaign ballooned into an almost year-long endeavor, collecting $5,000 for a scholarship for a worthy high-school student headed to university.
The campaign centred around a kindness brand for the store. Designing it herself, Cloney placed the “Be Good To People For No Reason” brand on shirts and mugs for customers to purchase in support of the campaign. They also teamed up with local jewelry maker Rose Adore to expand the campaign product offering. It was a huge hit.
But then came the dilemma of how to allocate a kindness scholarship.
“I had never run a scholarship before, so when we sat down and tried to figure out the criteria,” she says. “I came back around to [the idea that] I don’t want this person to apply….How do you have somebody apply to a kindness scholarship?”
Instead, she asked school officials to pick a student who best fit the following:
“The Kindness Spree scholarship recognizes and rewards an individual who has demonstrated exceptional acts of goodness, and has had a positive impact on others throughout the St. Stephen high school career. Their actions exemplified kindness, compassion, empathy and tolerance and promoted an inclusive environment.”
Supporters of the campaign were eager to know who won and came inquiring at the store and on social media, but Cloney was tight-lipped on the winner. On graduation day, a surprised Ryan Scott learned that he was the recipient of the scholarship.
“I was celebrating from home,” Cloney says. “I’m so excited for his parents because how amazing would it be to hear and read that criteria and then have your child’s name read afterward?
“What was awesome was after the fact, in the store, the conversations with the locals coming in…and everyone’s face just lit up,” she says. “Who is a good person that just made people feel good, made people feel safe, made people feel included? Who just put out the positive vibes? We’re really happy that when we say his name, it seems like there’s a general consensus that he was the one.”
But that wasn’t the only aspect of Kindness Spree. The store worked to create the Kindness Spree Club for kids in Grades 3 to 5. The club met at the local elementary school and made care packages for a local living facility for seniors, Lonicera Hall.
With the success of the first campaign behind them, Spree has embarked on another for this school year with a very special business partner.
“What’s keeping us busy right now is we are adding a new product to the line,” Cloney says. “We’ve partnered up with a very young entrepreneur who came to us and said she had an idea for the Kindness Spree campaign.”
The product is top secret but will be revealed soon.
“We’re working on it for our seventh birthday week which is the first week of August. She’s making a special appearance. Her business name hasn’t even been put into the world yet,” Cloney says.
Even though running an awareness and fundraising campaign is a lot of extra work, Cloney says the effort is worth the results she sees in the community.
“It’s doing exactly what we wanted in the sense that it’s inspiring me to keep going, to keep doing it and inspiring our school family to the same thing. And that’s exactly what the initiative was intended to be. So I will keep doing it, absolutely.”
Alex Graham is a Huddle reporter in Saint John. Send her your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].