New store going small in the Village

MUNCIE When Tamar Lask decided to open a business near Ball State University in Muncie, she decided to do something different.
She didn’t open Juniper, her women’s fashion store, in the new $60-million Village Promenade commercial-and-apartment development.
Instead, Lask and her husband, Peter, opened their third Juniper store in the Uni-Mart building across University Avenue from Village Promenade.
Lask said the decision was an easy one.
“Muncie Mall was not on our radar, not even a little bit,” Lask said. “We wanted to be adjacent to campus. We did inquire about Village Promenade., but we really liked the charm of the older space. And having real storefront windows appealed to us. It was smaller. We wanted to keep it simple. We wanted to keep it intimate.”
So Muncie’s newest clothing store and the Village’s newest business moved into the Uni-Mart, one of the neighborhood’s oldest commercial structures, having been built 80 years ago and still home to businesses like Insomnia Cookies.
The Ball State-area location is the latest move for Tamar and Peter Lask, who have been slowly growing in the retail business in Ohio and Indiana.Source