After a glance at the small, round meeting table, I placed my large catering tray on the credenza. Kelly was at her standing desk, three monitors running, a mood board pinned to the wall behind her. She'd been at it since before I'd texted to say I was on my way.
"Help yourself to coffee," she said without looking up. "Don't touch the blue folder."
"What's in the blue folder?"
"Everything that isn't ready yet."
I poured a coffee and studied the mood board. She'd pulled together color palettes, font options, logo concepts. Clean and local without being folksy. Nothing that screamed small-town-trying-too-hard. I recognized good instincts when I saw them.
Daisy arrived just after five with a gorgeous bouquet. Skye Adams was one step behind her, a dusting of flour on the tops of her sneakers, holding a Skye High Pies box.
"She wouldn't let me change," Skye said after she'd put her box next to my tray. She pulled off her disposable cap and tossed it into the trash basket next to the door.
"You said you were ready," said Daisy, popping her bouquet into a carafe of water on the credenza.
"I said I was almost ready."
"Same thing."
"It is absolutely not the same thing."
I let them settle. Poured them coffees, put my notebook on Kelly's meeting table, and uncapped my pen.
"Okay," I said. "Here's where we are."
They looked at me as they each took their seats.
I'd spent the previous evening mapping it out the way I used to plan supply runs. Every moving part. Every dependency. Every place the plan could break down if someone didn't do their job. It had helped then. It helped now.
"We have the meeting penciled for this coming Monday night. Twelve businesses confirmed, possibly more. We walk in there with a collective that already has a name, a look, and a pitch. We don't walk in asking for a vote on colors." I glanced through the glass panel beside the door at the rows of hot desks beyond. "Any chance we could use the workspace out there?"
Kelly shook her head. "Half of those people are working in different time zones. They'll be here all night."
"What about your place, Daisy?" Skye asked, referring to The Daisy Chain.
Daisy considered it for half a second. "Not the apartment. Josh wants to watch the game on Monday night. But the kitchen downstairs could work."
On seeing Kelly biting her lip, she added. “Relax. It’s big enough to house an army.”
I felt a smile pull at the corner of my mouth. "Fitting," I said. "Because that's exactly what this is."
"Right," Skye said. "What do we need to sort out?"
Kelly pulled up her laptop and turned the screen so we could all see. "Name first. Everything else hangs off the name."
That took forty minutes. Skye wanted something that referenced the town. Daisy wanted something that referenced crafts. Kelly wanted something that would survive a Google search in five years. I wanted something that didn't sound like a farmers' market desperate to survive.
We went through eleven options. Skye vetoed four of Kelly's. Kelly vetoed three of Daisy's. Daisy quietly and persistently advocated for "The Coogan's Break Makers Circle" until Kelly said, not unkindly, that it sounded like a quilting group.
"What about Select?" I said.
Silence.
"It's not location specific," Kelly said slowly. "But it could scale. And it's doing two things at once."
"Select, as in you get to choose," Skye said.
"And it's a collective," Daisy reminded us.
