Retail
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Monroe Street's "Orange" Appeal.
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Carol "Orange" Schroeder: Defining Monroe Street
August 1, 2009
As reported in the pages of In Business magazine.
Carol Schroeder, 57, never imagined she'd be in retail. Not entirely. And that may be the most surprising fact about this well-connected business owner. Together with husband, Dean, Schroeder has owned Orange Tree Imports for three decades. In fact, the store just celebrated its 34th anniversary in May.
"Since I was six years old, I wanted to be a writer," said Schroeder. At the age of nine she discovered Charles Dickens, who became the impetus behind a dream of visiting the land where he walked and wrote. She achieved that goal during a trip to England with a girlfriend when she was 16 years old.
That friend, who was of Danish descent, ended up having an influence on the business person Schroeder would later morph into.
When the girlfriends visited Denmark together, Schroeder simply "fell in love with the country." The trip sparked her interest in merchandising. "Until I went to Denmark," she said, "I didn't think of retailing." It also influenced her decision to double major in English and Danish as a student at Tufts University in Boston (where she met Dean), and to pursue the Master's degree she later earned from UW-Madison in Scandinavian studies. In between, she also spent a year studying in Copenhagen, Denmark's capital city.
After college, Schroeder approached a Madison Scandinavian furniture retailer, Bord & Stol, with the hopes of landing a job. There were no openings at the time, but as luck would have it, the owner had an interest in learning the Danish language. Soon after, Schroeder became her tutor. When Bord & Stol opened a branch store at 1721 Monroe St. (Orange Tree's current location), Schroeder was hired as manager. "She really took a leap of faith," said Schroeder of the owner, "because I had no retail experience."
A quick learner, Schroeder made up for any retail deficiencies with a passion for the products she sold. Six months later, she and her husband bought the 1,000-sq.-ft. store and broadened its inventory to include kitchen accessories, gifts, toys, and jewelry (some pieces she now designs herself). These days, Orange Tree Imports is one of the anchors of the Monroe Street shopping experience.
Over the years, Schroeder's writing skills have remained well-honed. Her first publication on Danish literature in translation "had a catchy (15-word) title," she joked. She has published and translated books on Danish embroidery, knitting, crocheting, and felting. Together with her mother — also a writer — Schroeder has co-authored medical terminology textbooks, and in 1997, she penned Specialty Shop Retailing, which has since been translated into Russian.
Most recently, Schroeder wrote Portraits of Monroe Street, a book conceived as a time capsule to celebrate and photograph Monroe Street retailers. She hopes that one day another generation will look back at the quilted diversity of Monroe Street shop owners and storefronts, and recognize the neighborhood's importance in the city's small business archives.
Schroeder, whose father was a dentist, hails from Pennington, New Jersey, a town that, in the 2000 Census, barely cracked a population of 3,000. She admits that hard work runs in her genes. "Even my grandmother worked full-time until she was 81 years old," she said.
So it's not surprising, then, that retirement is not something she contemplates often. "I think I'll follow my grandmother's pattern," she prophesied. "So far, so good!"
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