January Clearnance: 24th - 27th
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

All the businesses that belong to the Orange City Chamber will be celebrating January Clearance from Wednesday, the 24th through Saturday the 27th . Jubon Juweelen will have 15% all our Dutch food plus a large table of 50% off items. This will include Christmas and New Year's napkins made in Holland, vintage jewelry, silk flowers and silk flower arrangements, wedding accessories, Dutch lace curtains and many other items. We hope to see many of you between Wednesday and Saturday this week.

Big Changes
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens." Ecclesiastes 3: 1.

My husband and I have decided that it is time for Jubon Juweelen to downsize. We are not going away, but there will be a lot of changes. The biggest one is that we will be leaving our current building on July 31, 2018. We will keep our normal activity going through the Tulip Festival after which we will move our discs and books to a home based business at 204 Iowa Avenue NW. This could go a couple of different directions. We have our building at 107 3rd Street NE for sale. It could go to someone who wants to continue with the business much the same as it is now. Or it could go to someone who wants to put something completely different in the building. So, we don't know what our home based business will look like until our sale has been completed.

If the person we sell to doesn't keep the wooden shoes and some of the Dutch stuff, we will keep those ourselves. However, what we think will most likely change is all the consignment items that we have. We have a wonderful little room we built onto our house some years ago, but it won't hold everything we have here, so we will be limited in space as to what we keep. We know we want to keep the books and the discs. We also know that we will continue to operate the Straat Winkel during the Tulip Festival, but whether that means we have Delft and other Dutch items all year long, or whether we have them in storage until the Tulip Festival, we don't know yet. When I tell people that my husband will be 87 and I'll be 75 this year, they understand that we want to downsize a little.

We have loved our little business and especially loved visiting with the people from all over who come to visit our little shop. We hope that many will find a reason to come and shop or just visit at our home based business. We will still have coffee every afternoon around 3:00 p.m. and whoever is there at that time is welcome to join us. We may keep more of our services, but it is just too early to know exactly what the new format will look like.

Starting 10th year of the Jubon Journal
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

Ten years ago this next April we started issuing our newsletter, the Jubon Journal. It started with a little Internet business called Jubon in which an interactive car drove you to your favorite businesses. The car would drive around a map of Orange City (or several other towns) and stop at the store or location you requested. Once there a popup would open up and would connect you to the website of the business, if they had a website. Ten years ago a lot of businesses did not have a web presence. That's where we got our logo from – our little red car. Many people probably wonder why our logo is a car. You can actually still access the website by going to Jubon.biz in your browser. Although there is only one active customer left from our little business (Stacy Jasper's Water Werks), I still think it was a great idea. Juliana developed the web site and I actually use it several times a day to access our bank and to see telephone numbers in a hurry. It hasn't been kept up and so some of the information is not current, but it is still very useable and Jubon is the parent company of Jubon Juweelen.

Perusing our Guest Book
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

This is not our busiest time of year, but we still have had people visit us from many interesting places. Since the 20th of last month we have had people in the store from Alaska, California, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin, and all over Iowa. Many people were visiting family over the Holidays. We also had people sign our guest book from Aba Dhabi, UAE, Belfast, Northern Ireland and Guatemala.