About

Today

The Lesters Store is a project by friends Alison (Kendall) Swearingen and Megan Mansell Williams based on their scientific expeditions to San Miguel Island in the early 2000s and the stories of the Lester family. The Lesters is a pop-up, ephemeral retail store and gallery and is also available for design, branding, and marketing needs. Contact us to learn more.

History

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Once upon a time, Ali and Megan were field biologists for the University of California, Santa Cruz, working on a four person “SWAT” team studying the coastal biodiversity of the rocky  intertidal (the area exposed at low tide) along the West Coast of North America. From Alaska to Baja, Mexico, they crouched, crawled, scrambled, and slipped their way up and down the coast to catalog the life on the shore. The two marine biologists became fast friends and discovered other shared passions beyond seaweed and sea slugs. History, relics, cast-offs. Hunting for discarded treasures in barns, attics, garages, and junk shops.

Many of the SWAT team assignments took the biologists to the Channel Islands National Park off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. These are the islands of Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa Barbara. On solitary San Miguel, Ali and Megan walked on long, endless, shipwrecked beaches; tiptoed silently through a caliche forest; bobbed among cartoonish, giant coreopsis; and read books in the field station to escape the wind. One of the books encountered was The Legendary King of San Miguel about the life of Herbie Lester and his family, who lived on the island in the 1930s. From the field station today, it’s a short walk out to the site of Herbie’s Killer Whale Bar, where he entertained luminaries from the mainland and showed off his collection of shipwreck paraphernalia.

Somewhere on California’s backroads or at sea or in flight over snowy peaks, Ali and Megan hatched a plan to turn their love of collecting into a business. The Lesters Store is the result. The project embraces design, decor, branding, marketing, and more and its strong aesthetic harkens back to another time and reminds us, if not solely of the Lesters and of San Miguel Island, of Herbie’s own love of collecting and of the landscape around him.