Meet Stephanie Lentz, the owner of Scoop Marketplace in Kirkland, WA. She founded Scoop Marketplace, a package-free grocery and bulk goods store, in 2019 after years of being a mother and teacher. Her journey to entrepreneurship came unexpectedly — Stephanie opened Scoop Marketplace because she saw a gap in the market when she tried to embrace a more sustainable lifestyle for herself and her family. It wasn’t until Stephanie deep-dived into research on microplastics, minimalist lifestyles, and plant-based living that she realized “reuse, reduce, recycle” needed to be replaced with “refusing” wasteful consumerism.
Learn more about Stephanie and Scoop Marketplace in this week’s Business Spotlight Q&A!
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s something your customers may not know about you or your business?
I love to sing, and I am a performer! I have always been singing, but I haven’t done it much as an adult or since college. I used to participate in competitive choirs and travel and do musical theater and I enjoy voice acting. I love musical theater or Disney songs. As far as what I like to listen to, I enjoy the 80s — Queen and Journey. I like older stuff, too, like Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra.
What’s your favorite part about the community your business is in and why?
I love the Kirkland location because that’s where I grew up, and a lot of my family still lives over there. It’s very near to the schools that I went to and even my old church. It feels very much like home to me and that’s always been where I want to have my store. I think that for the community around Scoop in general, I just love our shared values and that I don’t feel like I have to explain myself around them — they just get it. We’re all working towards the same thing, we’re all trying to be a beneficial presence in the world, and we all want a brighter, healthier future for everybody. That was something that I didn’t have when I was creating my business plan. I was just hoping that other people were interested in this, hoping that there were other people who wanted to shop at a zero-waste store like I did. When I found those people it felt like a relief like, “Whew, I’m not alone.” It was great.
Why is it important to you and your business that people #SpendLikeItMatters?
I think that we all have a pretty good idea of the world we want to live in and the type of future that we want to participate in. I think that sometimes we don’t recognize how much power we have in shaping that and in bringing our vision of an ideal future to life and making it our ideal present. It really is so simple. Change your perspective, change your awareness. When you choose to invest in a small business, when you choose to invest in a business that is mission-driven and doing good things for our bodies and planet, when you choose to invest in a business owner who is being a beneficial presence in the world and is going to contribute to that world you want to live in, then you’re voting for that future. Thats really one of the best things we can do. We don’t even recognize what we’ve normalized and the impact it can have, positive or negative.