Mathilda Davies in her first Swedish shop in the Carolinas.
She has spotted the house that she plans to turn into a Swedish gift shop and European style deli. It’s located in Flat Rock, a small town nestled in the mountains two hours west of Charlotte, NC. “I had this idea last November,” says Mathilda Davies, adding that she wants to work with small, family-owned companies in need of representation in the U.S.
She already has a small shop called Swedish Treasuries at an emporium in Hendersonville, NC, where she sells Swedish-made goods, including artisan chocolates and caramels, fruit spreads, crisp bread, a hand sewn stuffed moose, soaps, traditional butter spreaders, and cheese slicers. It has to be made in Sweden, and not Swedish souvenirs made in China. One surprising best-seller is a dish cloth designed by Malin Westberg. It’s a thin, flat, and square sponge, made of cellulose fiber, and it’s something that you would find in most Swedish kitchens.
Mathilda came to South Carolina in 2000 to study business management at Limestone College, a Christian non-denominational college in Gaffney, S.C. She met her future husband, Justin, through his sister who had become her friend. They got engaged in January 2007 and were married a year later. Justin, who is from Winston-Salem, is currently studying for his master’s in engineering at N.C. State University.
“Importing goods to the U.S. can be tricky,” she says, more so after 9/11 when the rules got tighter. “There is a lot of paper work.”
Her parents back in Sweden help her to stay in touch with the sellers and manufacturers. She frequently travels to Sweden to keep a close business relationship with her vendors and to get new ideas.
She promotes her new business with a website and says that she got a lot of feedback after she gave a presentation for the local chapter of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. She is also a member of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in the Carolinas.
“Hendersonville has a large Scandinavian population,” she says. There are also tourists from Sweden and students that visit the store in search for goodies from home. Then there are Americans who have traveled to Sweden or studied there.
Mathilda is in the process of opening a second location at a house in Flat Rock, a town which was home to the famous Swedish-American writer Carl Sandburg from 1945 until his death in 1967. Once the new store is up and running, she plans to set up shop on the web too.
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