MARCIA GILBERT displays gift items that can be personalized.

Initially Yours back as home business

By DEBORAH MOON

article created on: 2009-04-01T00:00:00

Twenty-eight years ago, Marsha Gilbert started embroidering gift items in her home business so she could stay home with her children.

That business eventually evolved into a burgeoning store featuring personalized gifts of all sorts for celebrations ranging from baby namings and bar mitzvahs to graduations and weddings. Gilbert and her daughter Heidi Holmes ran the store in Raleigh Hills together for several years.

When Gilbert decided it was time to retire and spend time with her nine grandchildren a couple years ago, her customers “wouldn’t let me retire,” said Gilbert.

So when she and her husband built a new home in Tigard, just three miles from the old store, they included a shop and showroom so she could once again care for kids and work from home.

The new showroom still features many of the same type of gift items customers might remember from the Raleigh Hills store—musical sculptures with Hebrew writing serving as a backdrop to a photo cutout; baby items ready to be embroidered with names or initials; elegant wooden boxes with a Mogen David on the lid.

But the shop also features home decorating items, with Holmes supplying the decorating services for customers. Even fabrics for custom furniture can be embroidered on the shop’s single head embroidery machine, which can even embroider a person’s digitalized signature.

“I’m very much into personalization,” said Gilbert.

The shop’s owners are also into social action and tzedakah.

Many items in the shop are made in the U.S.A. or benefit a cause. Tote bags benefit education for Maasai children.

Gilbert will donate 10 percent of sales to support Jewish education in Portland.

“All the people who shop and ant to give to Jewish education can choose where they want their 10 percent to go,” she said, noting they can name any Jewish preschool or day school in town.

Initially Yours is open by appointment only. For an appointment or more information, contact Gilbert at 503-292-1769 or Holmes at 503-201-5799.