Hartford Prints!, a paper goods shop and retailer based on Pratt Street, is nearing its debut in front of an international audience.
The family run business, known for its products promoting Hartford and the state, will begin offering its top-selling apparel, letterpress stationery, hats, pins and other new travel items by April 1 at a kiosk in Bradley International Airport. The opening date is subject to change due to the coronavirus outbreak, according to co-owner Rory Gale.
Hartford Prints! recently signed a one-year lease, with an option for a second year, to operate a retail kiosk at the Windsor Locks airport located right off the main security checkpoint, Gale said.
The hope is that the kiosk, open seven days a week, will become a mainstay at Bradley and expand the company’s brand far beyond its 1,500-square-foot brick-and-mortar store at the south end of Pratt Street.
“The fact that we are at the airport legitimizes everything that we have been doing in Hartford on a much bigger scale,” said Gale, a Hartford resident who owns the business with her two sisters, Addy Gale and Callie Heilmann.
“As soon as you arrive in Connecticut you will be facing our products,” she continued. “That is just going to make a traveler’s experience with Connecticut change.”
Hartford Prints! and Hot Oven Cookies, of Springfield, Mass., are the first small businesses to operate kiosks at Bradley, which recently announced that eight food and retail vendors would either expand or add locations at the airport.
There were seven speciality-retail and food vendors who applied to occupy new food court areas in the redesigned Terminal A as part of the airport’s larger effort to improve its concession experience, according to a Bradley spokeswoman.
Bradley began accepting applications last summer, but Hartford Prints! had been planning to add a second location at the airport years earlier, said Rory Gale, who oversees the company’s daily operations.
Gale said creating a presence at Bradley was part of the company’s five-year plan to grow its sales footprint, and to bring locally-sourced goods and streetwear that are not currently found at the airport.
“People are looking for an identity, and Hartford Prints is providing that with all of our products,” she said. “I really believe that everything we are doing will change the way people relate to the state.”
In 2009, Addy Gale launched Hartford Prints! as a not-for-profit organization making items at a studio on Arbor Street, and grew the business via e-commerce sales.
The Gale sisters later joined forces and in Oct. 2013 debuted a shop on Pratt Street. They shed the Arbor Street space in 2016 as it now makes most of its products by hand downtown.
The business was initially spurred by a program forged between the city and downtown landlords that aimed to make it easier for small businesses/nonprofits to fill vacant retail space. Through the so-called iConnect program, Hartford Prints! was gifted six months of free rent and subsidized rent from downtown landlord Northland Investment Corp.
Gale said that more programs should be available to support entrepreneurs looking to occupy unused space on Pratt Street, where a $100-million redevelopment project is ongoing to reboot the retail corridor as a work, live and play destination.
Finding new uses for dormant space downtown, she said, would be a boon to all retailers in and around Pratt Street.
“Right now, we are operating on an island,” Gale said. “When we opened some people called the store a pop up, but we knew we would be here for a long time. Now we get to take that next step.”
