Vadder Mercantile - a small town, family run store.

Lacy Vadder talks about how Vadder Mercantile came to be a real life Mercantile in small town America. Along with her husband, Karl, they have three children ranging in ages 12-15. You will often find the children up at the Mercantile working! Karl also builds custom furniture. Lacy is a cOTA and runs her own therapy and tutoring business out of the same location. This is a family that does it all. 😊 Read to learn more! 👇🏼

“The original Vadder Mercantile was opened in 1920 in Lovell, OK by Karl’s great grandparents. Karl has dreamed of owning a similar store since he was a kid. We have discussed opening a mercantile many times over our 19 years of marriage but the timing wasn’t right. In 2017 we bought the building we are in now and opened Furniture Foundry, which is our brand of custom wood furniture and cabinetry. Furniture Foundry sold wood slab tables, signs, and cabinets. In 2019 we began discussing that the time was right to finally live out the dream of opening a mercantile store. When everything closed down due to covid in March 2020 we revamped our building, moved Lacy’s Learning Lab to the center section of the building so we could convert the back space to a commercial kitchen, and transition the front to a store.

I, Lacy, have always enjoyed cooking and found it difficult to purchase all of the fresh seasonings I use so much in my recipes. I felt that offering fresh seasonings, and ones that are difficult to find in stores, would be an asset to the store and the community. We use our commercial kitchen to package our brand of seasonings and create crockpot mixes, dips, soups…. We spent some time shopping around town to see what everyone is offering our community and passerby’s. We felt it was important to not compete with one another so we started making lists of things we wanted to offer in our store that isn’t found in other shops in the community. We also wanted to keep the old time mercantile standard. So we buy and sell things that are locally made, and things that are made to be used on a daily basis. We are family owned and operated, our children work in the store when they are not participating in their various school activities. Lacy runs the store and packages all of the seasoning and writes the recipes for each dip and mix. Karl and his employees hand builds all of the furniture and cabinets. We love carrying things that are made by other small family owned businesses.

Many unique grocery items can be found in our store as well as a number of one of a kind, handmade household items.

We carry our Furniture Foundry line in the store but also take custom orders. Vadder Mercantile Seasoning and Mixes can be found in our store as well as Designs by Dennis in Kingfisher. We recently started carrying audio equipment and Woofer Keeper brand speaker boxes, which is another Vadder family brand. We offer affordable custom laser engraving as well.

We collect donations every month to help support various organizations. Certain months out of the year we give a percentage of our sales to the organization we have chosen for that month.

I apologize if we are ever closed when you stop by. Because we are family run, we sometimes have to close to attend our children’s events or take them to appointments. They are only young for a little while so we want to spend as much time supporting them as we can.”

We feel that our little hometown has so much to offer! We love to highlight the shops and show what is available when shopping local. (You can find some other local shops highlighted on our social media pages. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and MeWe @89ersisters). We are thankful for all of the people who have invested their time and money into making this town a great place to live. Vadder Mercantile is one example of a local, young family who is investing their resources into providing unique opportunities for a small town.

I hope that if you’re ever within reasonable distance of our town, you stop in and see all that Hennessey has to offer!

Blessings!

Summer ☀️