Beverly Pearce celebrates 5th on Main Street

Beverly Pearce this month celebrated her fifth-year anniversary in her boutique shop BS Pearce on Main Street in Seal Beach.

It was Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. The celebration was low key, just like Pearce herself and the shop.

The boutique, she says barely breaks even, but she believes in the mission to provide value to local customers and support local business by helping to bring people to Main Street.

“The shop was actually losing money due to the economy,” she said. “It

was going belly-up, so I decided to step in.”

Pearce is quick to point out that the boutique is a labor of love for her, and is not her “day job” so to speak.

“I could not afford my home on 16th Street in Seal Beach if I had to rely on the boutique to pay my bills,” she said, with a hardy laugh. She explained that her real source of income, and what supports the boutique is Pearce Consulting Inc., where she is the president and chief financial officer.

The company specializes in housing, commercial development and acquisition/relocation consulting contracts.

A lot of what the business does is to help many people keep a roof over their head in times of emergency. Some of the work it has been involved with includes:

• 125 placements and supportive services for the HACLA Welfare to Work program, and

• 20 over income relocations for NAPICO Park Vista Apartments in Anaheim, California.

• The ongoing relocation of 300 cases from three project sites for National Housing Ministries in Glendale, California;

• 25 emergency relocations for HACLA at their (HACLA’s) Aliso Village Housing Project Much of the work Pearce’s consulting company does helps to create more affordable senior housing.

When she is not wearing her corporate hat, Pearce likes to dabble in helping her employees run her boutique.

It contains an eclectic array of merchandise, with much of it on consignment. There is even a piano for sale that Pearce will sit at and pretend to play for a photo shoot.

The shop represents fun on some level for Pearce. But it also represents what she and others describe as her commitment to keeping Main Street alive.

Pearce once showed her commitment to supporting local business by taking out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper, urging people to “Shop Local.”

To that end, Pearce said she thinks the city of Seal Beach needs to do more to support local businesses and bring customers to the Main Street merchants.

“We need to support our sales tax generators and learn to help keep our sales tax money here,” she said. “People need to understand that when they go to South Coast Plaza to shop, they are sending a lot of money out of the city and giving it to someone else.”

Pearce said local sales tax is the key to the city providing quality services such as police, sewers etc.

“How else can you pay to get the pot holes fixed in the streets and the sidewalks upgraded?” she said.

Pearce has lived in town on and off for about 20 years. She even ran for the Old Town seat on the Seal Beach City Council, but lost out to current Councilman Charles Antos.

Pearce said she hoped to bring some progress to the town.

“I decided that the city did not want to seek progress and that it would rather stay a poor bedroom community rather than a lovely beach community,” she said.

Pearce said that while times are tough for her boutique, they are hard all over.

“I want to keep the store alive during the recession if I can and then hopefully things will swing back,” she said.

She said she hopes the boutique and other Main Street shops can one day add a lot more to the sales tax revenue of Seal Beach.

“We can not afford to just live off of property tax any longer,” she said. “During these dark times we need to support our local businesses.”

Beverly Pearce has two sons, one who lives with her in Seal Beach and the other who lives in Seattle, Wash.  Both sons attended the local Los Alamitos Unified School District.

BS Pearce is located at 246 Main St.

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