Hoai-Tran Bui, special to wtop.com
ARLINGTON, Va. – Teddy bears wearing straw hats sit alongside Easter bunnies dressed in purple frocks on shelves behind the cash register. Smurfs key chains and leftover Christmas ornaments sprawl over the cluttered glass counter, which houses a pristine collection of handcrafted miniature bears.
Behind this counter sits Elizabeth Taylor, 48, and her husband Bill Taylor, 55, co-owners of Agape Bears, a small teddy bear store in Ballston Common Mall. The store has been open for more than 15 years, steadily growing from a place to sell Elizabeth’s handmade bears and collectibles to a beloved stuffed animal shop in Arlington. But after years of gaining loyal customers and organizing bear donations for local fire and police departments, Agape Bears is closing on Sunday.
“I feel like this is a fixture of the community,” Bill says, “and we’ve tried to make it that way. We’re more like big-hearted people than we are business people.”
Never ones to shy away from their customers’ personal lives, the Taylors sometimes acted as unofficial therapists. The warm demeanor of the owners and store was often an invitation for many bored or lonely customers to approach them or even extend an invitation for Christmas dinner.
“It’s a good feeling to be able to affect someone’s life, and it’s happened more than once. People would come in, and we’d just be friends to them,” Bill says. “People were more than just customers, more than just a number, more than just a sale.”
Elizabeth adds that some customers didn’t have anyone else to talk to, and she didn’t mind being there for them.
“There’s not a whole lot of stores where you can go in and the salespeople are friendly, and you do get people sometimes who just need someone to listen to them,” she says.
Agape Bears is one of the rapidly disappearing stores that evoke a feeling of home, Bill says. It’s a callback to old country stores that sold glass Coca-Cola bottles and had a front porch where shoppers could buy hardware, milk or fishing gear all at once.
Leaning on the glass counter, Bill reminisces about a general store his uncle owned in Oklahoma, saying that’s what he wanted Agape Bears to resemble. Bill used to play in a band and would host informal jam sessions in Agape Bears, where he would bring his bass and have a “picking session” with people who brought their guitars.
“It was more like an extension of life, more like an extension of our home, than it was a retail establishment,” Bill says. “This was a labor of love.”
Though he says he and his wife weren’t making a profit off the store in recent years, they kept it open because of the people.
On a Saturday in early February, Arlington resident Sharon Smith came into Agape Bears to shop for a bear. She didn’t hide her disappointment that the store was closing.
“You can always walk in and find something for any holiday or occasion, so it’s a shame that it’s closing,” Smith says.
Charity work with Good Bears of the World
The Taylors are members of the nonprofit website.
Elizabeth has a special investment in the teddy bear craft and hopes to dive deeper into the art world once she and her husband retire.
“There’s just something about (bears),” Elizabeth says. “They tend to talk to me, you tend to look at them and you get a sense that they’re not inanimate, that there’s a soul — not even a soul — like there’s something there.”
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