Sidecca – Adriana Molina

Hi, I’m Adriana Molina. I’m an Altadena native, also. Our store moved up to Altadena in 2023 and we were open about a year and a half before the fire. Our building is still there. We’re a handful of properties that that survived the fire and pretty much everything in front of us to the right of us. The debris is still there, and is why we have not reopened our doors. We don’t own the property, so we’re also waiting for our landlord, who has been gracious and helpful in this whole time.

Altadena is just a small town community that supports anything local and as a native I grew up there. My goal even having my store for the last over 10 years, I wanted to end my journey in the city that I grew up in. The reason why I’m even trying to. Continue to do pop-ups is because of my customers. They have reached out since January and. I’m sorry I get teary eyed and. And the sense of community that’s here is something you don’t find everywhere. So because of my customers and my community is why I’m going to try, I’m going to try to stay open.

But it’s really scary. It’s going to be a long road. I lost about 60% of my customers. They lost their homes, half of my kids’ friends lost their homes, my brother. So it’s very close to home and everyone’s rooting for us. Everyone’s rooting for anything left in Austina to continue, and that’s motivated me tremendously to not give up. I’ve been in business for a long time and at first it was, I’m going to be honest, it was a hard no. Like, there’s no way I can survive. It’s going to be years before the town recovers, and the more I communicated with my customers and we all came together at any event, any pop-up, any community event, the more they encouraged me, “You have to come back. You have to come back, if you don’t come back, then how are we going to come back?” And because I’m still standing, I think it makes it a really difficult situation for all of us, all of the small businesses that are still standing because we have lost our community.

So it becomes a destination. It becomes an intentional visit from our customers, who are all displaced, to even come visit us, so I’m coming up with a plan to reopen. I have one and I want to do it, but it’s scary. I have to reinvent my space. It won’t be what it was, but I have been thinking about a lot of different new ideas for our space, still keeping who we were because they want us to not change, but also offering something that the community needs.

My biggest plan that I want for reopening is to take maybe 30-40% of my store space—we’re a retail clothing store and gift shop, so that need is not going to be there as we move forward the next couple of years as much as it was—so I really want to allow my space to be partly a community space as well.

Yes, I have to stay in business. Yes, I have to sell retail products, but I also want to invest in my store to create this lounge, somewhere you can come in, sit, buy water. I have to get creative with what I sell. There is nowhere up there to really buy a water, a snack. People they want somewhere familiar, and that’s why I hear over and over and over from all of my customers. The last two months I’ve been doing pop-ups in my front yard, and there’s an outpour of the community who comes because they want something familiar.

I was very fortunate. My home survived. I’m pretty much about two blocks away from the end of the burn zone. And they just want something familiar. Our space was like a happy store–everybody calls it the happy store. It has pink floors, really colorful, and we’re on the corner of Mariposa and Lake, which is the main small downtown of Altadena. There’s about four businesses next door to me in the building, too, but I don’t know what their plans are. My goal is to try to encourage the others. If I reopen, then more will follow, and then do some kind of a big re-grand opening for that neighborhood, for that block. That’s another big project that I have in my head. I do plan to reopen. My goal is to open fourth quarter, probably November, and I want to reopen with the presence of I’m here to stay, I’m here to stay for the long haul.

And I’ve been doing these pop ups as well because I kept one employee who’s been with me for 13 years. I need whatever financial situation we’re in to stretch for, I’m going to say, two years, so that’s a little bit of my plan for the shop. I would like to bring back my third employee. They’ve both been with me for 13 years, but at the moment I just don’t see that. And we will have to change our business hours, and I know that my neighbors that are up there in the area, we’ll work, we work well together already, but we really haven’t been connected because they’ve also lost their homes.

So the future is unpredictable, and there’s a lot of what ifs. I have customers who we’re going to rebuild and now they’re moving. So there’s a lot of new feelings, a lot of new good energy, bad energy, scary energy that’s happening in our community. But I’m here to say that I do plan on reopening, and I’m really proud of it. I am part of the Altadena Chamber of Commerce. I actually won Business of the Year this year in Altadena. I was supposed to get my award on February 7th at the Altadena Country Club that also burned down. I’m here for the long run, and I that’s the message I also want to pass on to my customers now that I’m ready to express it.