In a nutshell
A 600-square-foot Greenwich Village emporium that proves “shop local” can be a viable retail concept in its own right - part general store, part manifesto, part media HQ, part physical index of New York’s maker economy, stocked entirely with goods produced within 100 miles of the city.
In their words
Brand Background
The Locavore Variety Store is the creation of Caroline Weaver, a shopkeeper, author and small-business advocate who first came to attention with CW Pencil Enterprise, a specialist pencil shop she opened at age 23 on the Lower East Side in 2014. That store - which sold over a million pencils, hosted a book club and became a minor cult destination for stationery obsessives - closed in late 2021 after seven years, a casualty of pandemic-era supply chain pressures and changing foot traffic.
After closing CW Pencil, Weaver channelled her shopkeeper instincts into a different mission: documenting every independent retail business in New York City on foot. Over four years she walked more than 40,000 blocks across all five boroughs, cataloguing over 14,000 shops by hand - no algorithms - to build The Locavore Guide, a searchable online directory that launched in 2021 and has since expanded into a pocket-sized printed guidebook (see Shopify, “14,000 businesses, 40,000 blocks: Meet the defender of NYC small businesses,”.
The Locavore Variety Store opened in June 2024 as the physical manifestation of that directory. Weaver describes the concept as “a shop about shopping” and “a shop about New York” - an emporium stocking 700-plus products from 130-plus independently owned brands, all grown, baked, fabricated, assembled, crafted, concocted, sewn, stuffed or pickled within roughly 100 miles of the city.
The assortment is deliberately catholic: handmade Brooklyn brooms (Lower Valley), table linens (Linoto), fancy candles (Joya Studios), artist-made body oil (A.OK Oil), dried fettuccine (Borgatti’s), pickles from a barrel (Eddie’s Pickles, New York’s oldest pickle maker), Wiffle balls from Shelton, Connecticut, wool dusters from a family business in the Bronx, and Dum-Dum-wrapper lighters handmade by comedian Amy Sedaris.
The store also sells The Locavore Guide to Shopping NYC - now in its 2026 edition with 789 listings - positioning the shop as both a retail destination and a gateway to the wider ecosystem of local businesses the guide celebrates.
Visit Field notes
Design-wise, Weaver fitted out the 600-square-foot space herself, sanding and staining the floors and sourcing vintage shelving from a Canarsie warehouse to create a nostalgic, colourful environment inspired by New York’s gourmet grocery stores of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The result is deliberately accessible: items range from a few dollars to higher-end housewares, and the merchandising invites browsing across cleaning supplies, pantry staples, stationery, decor, candy and gifts without the intimidation of a curated design boutique.
For retail professionals, the store offers a compact case study in how a media property (the Guide) can be monetised through physical retail, how hyper-local sourcing can be turned into a brand proposition, and how one shopkeeper’s advocacy for independent retail can itself become a viable small business.
Weaver has described her philosophy bluntly: “If we want our city to be full of great shops, we have to actually shop at them” (see The Locavore Guide Instagram, November 2025).
The Variety Store is her attempt to make that easier - and to prove that the general store, long thought extinct in Manhattan, can still find an audience.
Other Reading
Caroline Weaver's instagram is a must-follow, with regular well-produced video interviews with New York's resident makers, crafters and producers - https://www.instagram.com/thelocavorenyc/
The Locavore guide (online and in print) - https://thelocavore.com/
Reviews at opening - SecretyNYC, WhatNow
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