Small Business Saturday kicks off on Saturday, November 30, and the City of Pasadena announces “Shop Local Pasadena” to shine a spotlight on our more than 1,600 retailers and 700 eateries here beneath our parrot-filled skies.
On Small Business Saturday, 26 indie businesses across Pasadena will offer shoppers a choice of two free, limited-edition tote bags while supplies last. Customers can pick up a “Shop Local Pasadena” canvas tote at any participating location, or a special “Pasadena Crafted” tote designed in partnership with Visit Pasadena and illustrated by small local business Little Friends of Printmaking.
And, to take some of the pressure off our busy holiday streets, not to mention making it easier on shopper (parking being a major urban stressor), Pasadena Transit will offer free rides on Friday. November 29 and Saturday November 30, making stops at all 2024 Welcome Station Locations. Do check out Octavia’s Bookshelf (1365 North Hill Avenue) for thoughtfully curated books and more that shine on a light on creative importance of Black and Brown authors. Also swing by The Original Whistle Stop (2490 E. Colorado Boulevard) for a a retro model-train fix.
But entrepreneurism refuses to abide by city limits.
In answer to the question, “What possesses someone to choose the entrepreneurial path?,” especially in today’s rocky economic climate, our walkabout took us across the San Gabriel Valley. We encountered three very different expressions of entrepreneurship, all surprising. Each in their own way, these unusually creative entrepreneurs hold space for big ideas that go way beyond the retail model.
THE TRANSFORMER: Sierra Madre hair-designer Gigi Hutchinson builds community with every snip, flip and splash of pigment.
THE ILLUMINATOR: Glendale’s Leonardo (Leo) Torosian is a forensic vexillologist (it’s okay — we didn’t know what that meant either) passionately dedicated to reclaiming and restoring long-lost symbols and stories of Armenia.
THE VISIONARY: Amy Torrez of Sierra Madre has just received her tax-exempt status to open and operate “Amy’s Place.” Her vision: provide temporary, low/no cost, Airbnb-style housing to individuals undergoing chemo and other therapies, and their caregivers.
THE TRANSFORMER
- Gigi Hutchinson
- Rockin’ Rollers Salon & Boutique
- www.rockinrollersusa.com
- 38 East Montecito Avenue #10, Sierra Madre
Gigi Hutchinson is a rainbow warrior-woman glowing with the spectrum, beginning with the ink on her skin and the ultraviolet, teal and electric green strands (depending upon the day) in her long tresses.
She says, “I have always been an entrepreneur. I have so many different ideas and ways of doing things that working for someone else never was a fit for me. I can see the value as well as the struggle.”
After opening in 2015, together with her husband Joe, a musician who songwrites, performs and produces under the name Joe Normal, the Hutchinsons whip up ordinary magic daily at Rockin’ Rollers, a Sierra Madre creative boutique space that is best described as a cosmic groove. It’s nestled in a charming cul-de-sac in the Montecito arts district, across the way from R.T. Rogers Brewery. Gigi, along with hairdresser and professional makeup artist Anna Vales, cuts, colors, perms and styles hair in the front of house, while Joe offers songwriting lessons in the smaller section of the 400-square-foot space.
“It’s cozy,” smiles Gigi. And that’s why her customers are loyal. It’s an intimate, personal space, reflective of a time when women congregated weekly in the beauty parlor for a Saturday afternoon wash and set and when men gathered at the barbershop for a smooth shave and a trim for a sharp Saturday night out.
Carefully curated pieces from local artisans find their places on the shelves, including intriguing boho jewelry and beeswax candles. In addition to running the salon, Gigi and colleagues recently launched a new women’s collective called “The Traveled Path,” a loose confederacy of like minds and free spirits who live by the mantra “inspire-support-share-connect.” The collective is designed to provide resources for female entrepreneurs, as well as collaboration in other areas.
My eyes instantly go to a package of “Suavecita” brand pink foam rollers, which trigger a bodega full of retro memories.
Gigi says, “We work with specific brands that are clean, organic, and/or vegan, such as Loma, Amika, Verb and Earthly Body. As for Suavecita, they also have an awesome makeup line. We want to have something for everyone!”
Anticipating glam holiday coiffures, Anna expertly plies a client’s dark hair with perm solution.
“Perms have come a long way since people fried their hair at the shopping mall in the 1980s,” she says as I recall my own Harpo Marxian, bubble-headed horror at the hands of a Glendale Galleria technician. “The chemicals are gentler now, and the key is to use a solution that supports the health of the client’s hair,” says Anna. “This prevents that kind of crunchy damage people are still complaining about 30 years after a bad perm. Also, I use an assortment of sizes when choosing the rods, so it’s not that stiff, cookie-cutter look. Mixing rod sizes when we do the set gives body and a more soft, natural texture and more movement.”
Gigi’s thing is color, and she says the holidays are a perfect time to add excitement. “This does not mean that you have to add a bright red stripe and a bright green stripe to your hair, although I’d love that,” she says. “So many people, especially moms, get all stressed out over the holidays, so we like to suggest a new ‘do’ as a way to relax and reward yourself. It could even be taking salt-and-pepper grow-out to an elegant pewter shade of silver, or adding some highlights as a way to add some festive sparkle.”
Gigi forecasts loose curls, braids, and the iconic Messy Bun as holiday looks that are easy to achieve and even easier to live with. “Nothing complicated,” she says. “The last thing any woman wants right now is high-maintenance hair.”
A quick trick when long hair is feeling heavy is the undercut, where the layers closest to the skin are cut, and the nape is buzz-shaved, leaving the top layers free and more swingy. “To each their own, but if someone has long, thick hair, it can feel a little like wearing a fur coat on your head,” says Gigi. “Reducing bulk can be very refreshing, and you still have long hair.”
Another clever take: planting a splash of color — real color, as in indigo or magenta — in the underneath layers of the hair, only visible in an updo. This way, the wearer can look perfectly vanilla at a day job, all the while secretly rocking a streak of the wild thang waiting to be unleashed.
The COVID shutdown closed many small businesses across the USA, but the Hutchinsons prevailed. She says, “It was not easy for us hairdressers and small businesses. We all got hit really hard. At one point, we couldn’t even work inside our businesses, which was crazy. It was a sad and lonely time. We had to be creative to survive.”
The keys? “Patience, diligence and consistency. And, of course, the willingness to ride the waves.”
THE ILLUMINATOR
- Leo Torosian
- The Teotorosian Initiative
- www.teotorosian.com
- Glendale
Leo Torosian is a vexillologist, meaning someone who studies flags (who knew?). His particular approach is forensic since most of the flags he researches, studies and reconstructs have not been seen for a century or more.
He prowls eBay for Armenian flags that have fallen into the hands of casual collectors, discerning between battle flags versus ceremonial banners. He consults with scholars around the world, including those at the Armenian Museum of America near Boston, literally piecing together with needle and thread forgotten, suppressed histories. He maintains a sprawling spreadsheet of hundreds of catalogued flags along with sources, citations and future leads.
And, like all late-night online shoppers, sometimes Leo snaps up a purchase that’s just too good to pass up, even though it’s off-brand. An example: a Russian flag emblazoned with Armenian-language inscriptions, surrounding the appliqued profile of Lenin. The silhouette has been abraded, perhaps with an emery cloth, we presume, in an attempt at literal erasure.
“I couldn’t resist buying it,” says Leo.
After learning basic sewing skills via YouTube tutorials, he now recreates the flags he discovers using a sleek Brother sewing machine with embroidery software.
“Using the artifact, the actual physical object as the resource versus written material to reclaim Armenia’s stolen legacy is very powerful,” says Leo.
His background is polyglot and international, to say the least. Leo, the great-grandson of Armenians who fled the Ottoman Empire, was born in Cordoba, Argentina and grew up in Montreal. He’s recently worked as the Aide to the Vice-Consul to the Embassy of France in Washington, DC, and as Director of Public Affairs, Québec, as well as a Political Attaché to the Assemblée Nationale du Quebec. He’s served as Advisor to the Chief of Staff at the High Commission of Diaspora Affairs in Yerevan, Armenia, as well as Executive Assistant to the Ambassador (LES) Embassy of Armenia in Ottawa.
But a stint in Armenia as a government worker during 2020 — “stranded by COVID,” says Leo — lit the creative spark.
“Academics and the work that fellow scholars do are tremendously important. But a Ph.D dissertation is usually written, read once, and then put on the shelf. It’s unusual for anyone to ever hear of it again, so in many ways, all of that discovery is, in a practical sense, lost. Because people don’t even realize it’s there, they never know how to look for it. I became absolutely obsessed with linking academia with real life,” says Leo.
He soon learned that sleuthing out historic flags that have been out of sight for decades sometimes offers insights not available through other paths of study. His purpose: “To tell Armenia’s story to the world so that genocide never happens again.”
Leo says, “The genocide almost entirely ended a civilization which was, still is, one of the oldest cultures in the Middle East-Eurasia region. The catastrophic scale of the genocide experienced in Armenia was so atrocious, and unlike the Nazi Holocaust, the Ottoman Empire got away with it.”
The loss of life during the genocide between 1915 and 1917 is estimated at around 1.5 million, representing 80 percent of the total Armenian population. To date, the Turkish government maintains that there was no official policy of extermination implemented against the Armenian people as a group, thus disqualifying the atrocities as genocide.
Leo’s search for a nearly erased past is an engagement with mystery as much as history. The high-tech detective work of finding and ultimately recreating the flags is at once an unraveling and a reuniting of tangled and broken threads.
Adding to the mystery is the fact that the original flags were quickly improvised from whatever scrap fabric could be found. They were one-of-a-kind and not mass-produced, so each modern sighting is akin to a seemingly impossible last glimpse of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
Leo compares the rebels who led the Armenian revolution to fellow Argentine Che Guevara, saying, “They absolutely were the equivalent of guerilla-style freedom fighters. The men who led this revolution were educated in Europe and brought back with them the ideological ideals of that generation: liberty, equality, and justice for all. Flags at the time of the great national awakenings were integral to these revolutions across empires.”
“To create enthusiasm around their ideals, these men photographed themselves with their weapons and flags prior to battle,” says Leo. “It is important to highlight here that this was not a standing army, these were small groups working in a decentralized way, and every group had their own hand-sewn, custom flag. The pictures of these groups were printed in postcards and newspapers to gather interest and support in the revolution.”
Often, Leo catches just a glimpse of a corner of a flag in a faded photograph and may search for months before finding another image containing the same flag. Based upon his findings, he will then design and sew a faithful likeness of the flag, as well as corresponding embroidered patches and stickers. He offers these for sale on (where else?) Etsy.com at Teotorosian, but more importantly, he often visits conferences, youth camps and other community settings to share his message.
Many of the surviving pieces have a charmingly funky, “outsider,” folk-art feel, displaying “Liberty or Death” slogans, lions, eagles, crosses, skull-and-crossbones, scenes of landscapes, acronyms and important dates, many of which have been adopted as symbols of the current Republic of Armenia founded in 1991. Poignantly, some even attempt to replicate the American flag.
“Seeing a photo that’s more than a century old, looking into the faces of our ancestors, and then holding a recreation of the flag they literally carried into battle…it makes it real,” says Leo.
THE VISIONARY
- Amy Torrez
- Amy’s Place
- www.amysplace.org
- Sierra Madre
We may all have that friend who went to India for their hip replacement surgery or the one who drives down to TJ for some budget dental work. However, Indiana native and entrepreneur Amy Torrez has a unique perspective, seeing the San Gabriel Valley as a hub for medical tourism.
“Right here in our community, we have USC Arcadia Hospital, City of Hope in Duarte, and the Robert & Beverly Lewis Family Cancer Center in Pomona,” she says. “These state-of-the-art medical facilities draw patients with serious medical needs that may not be met elsewhere.” She explains that the trouble lies not in the care itself, but in getting to it, often blocked by the cost of housing/living in our region temporarily or otherwise, paired with our hair-raising traffic.
Amy’s Place is her solution, offering the patient and caregiver a safe, convenient space for the duration of treatment with virtually no out-of-pocket cost to them.
“I created Amy’s Place in June 2024 in response to an unspoken need,” she says. “Unless you happen to be lucky enough to live right in this community, getting here from other parts of Los Angeles is a nightmare. There is no rush hour anymore. The traffic is brutal 24/7, and sorry to say, mass transit is not efficient here. If your loved one is undergoing cancer treatment or another sort of high-intensity care, they need attention around the clock, and they often will need transportation to an appointment daily or multiple times every week.”
“Other conditions that might require a similar arrangement could be cardio issues, the aftermath of an accident with resulting coma, or orthopedic replacements,” says Torrez. “These are all conditions requiring a long recovery. Driving across town every day in Los Angeles to see your loved one adds stress, and a hotel stay nearby for several days or several weeks is just out of reach financially for many people. My purpose is to offer a comfortable alternative, a place to stay while going through extremely difficult times. We believe that our holistic approach to a patient’s care greatly improves the likelihood of faster recovery, thanks to lowered financial and emotional stress.”
This is not purely blah-blah-blah theory for Amy. Her father, Paul, endured lymphoma while residing near Brownsville, Texas and traveling to Houston for treatment.
“I had just graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. Initially, I crashed at a friend’s house. But then my dad was in ICU, and a church nearby provided a place for me to stay.” She tended to her father’s treatment side effects, which included chills, high fever and convulsions, which lasted for three weeks.
“Some nights, I stayed beside him all night. I was in a fully furnished apartment, literally a home away from home. I loved being nearby so I could meet his basic life needs, cook for him, ” says Torrez.
The private space, she says, was also essential to her own well-being as a caregiver. “I needed a place to rest, recharge, and release emotions. I didn’t want to cry in front of my dad. I had to be strong for him.”
Like his daughter, Paul Torrez was a Scorpio. After surviving a 1990 heart transplant, he beat lymphoma but died of a heart attack in 2000 at age 63. “I had moved back to Indiana,” Amy recalls. “I got married and had kids.” In 2015, Amy founded her first nonprofit in Fort Wayne based on her recent experience.
She ran the operation for eight years, making leased corporate apartments available to families who were experiencing what she had gone through with her father. COVID slowed down her plans for expansion in Indiana, which included constructing her own facility on a parcel of open land there.
A solid corporate career in hospitality and insurance implementation had prepared her for building and maintaining the needed organizational infrastructure of that first venture. After graduating from the University of Austin Business School, she worked for the Marriott chain in sales, catering, and as a trainer, taking a particular interest in revenue recording, analysis, tracking and metrics.
Life changes then brought Amy to Southern California in December 2023 where she then saw a huge need for temporary medical housing and started Amy’s Place.
“My concept is a way of paying it forward,” says Amy. “Providing this option can prevent families from incurring crushing debut, in addition to their anxiety, grief, and sorrow in the experience of caring for a critically ill loved one. It is one way to make someone’s road a little smoother and actually guards against debt-based poverty.”
The Amy’s Place facility will not discriminate against anyone on the basis of their financial standing, and the price of staying will be a suggested donation of $25 per night.
She is currently in the process of seeking out an existing house to remodel, somewhere between Sierra Madre and Pomona. She’s also applying for grants, seeking corporate sponsors, building her Board of Directors, and planning fundraisers, including a nine-hole golf tournament for 2025. She recently joined the Arcadia Chamber of Commerce and the Pomona Chamber of Commerce.
She has created a giving structure for individual donors, including a modest monthly membership model. She says, “My training in hospitality has made me hyper-aware of cleanliness, so this will be a key priority, especially since we will be serving immune-compromised people and lots of elders. It will be a communal setting with a shared kitchen, so commercial cleaners will be used to keep the common areas spotless. Each bedroom will have its own microwave and a mini-fridge, which is, of course, handy for medications that need to be chilled. There will be an industrial-grade washer-dryer on the premises, which is essential.”
“I learned from doing this work that, for many people, the last time that strong bonds form is while caring for our loved ones,” she says. “There is an attitude of support that goes a long way, even if it’s something as simple as carpooling to the hospital, unloading the dishwasher, or just going for a midnight pizza run.”
