SEEMS LIKE A DREAM

Wow,

Ten years at our store in Venice! Writing that still feels surreal. In those years, so much has happened.

I first moved to Venice in the winter of 2010, just before my father passed away. I arrived with no plan, only an open heart and the hope of finding a community. Venice, in early 2011, was the right place for such a search: full of spirit, teeming with artists and wanderers, alive with possibility. It welcomed me in my grief, gave me a home when I had none, and offered me friendships, music, and unexpected doorways into other dimensions.

Fourteen years later, I am a husband, a father, and the keeper of a small company called Late Sunday Afternoon. None of that would exist without the scarves. Once I began making them, the connection was instant—so pure and undeniable that stopping felt impossible. That passion swept me forward. From 2012 to today, the scarves have been both compass and current, pulling me toward a life I could never have designed.

In the summer of 2015, the current carried me further still. I was offered the chance to open a store, and the energy around that moment was as undeniable as when I made my first scarf. Life is astonishing when it insists upon itself like that. The store opened, and with it came all the realities of adult life: staff to manage, books to balance, the difficult art of customer service, and the harder art of balancing work and family. And then, on the very night the doors first opened, I met my wife, Kaci. I had been waiting my whole life for a connection like that. Of course it arrived in the same breath as another beginning.

Life, I’ve learned, has chapters. Some are luminous, some painful, but all of them are worth holding. A practice of mine is to scroll back through the years in my phone’s photos. Doing so is a reminder of the ways I’ve changed, the friends who’ve come and gone, the connections that once served me but no longer do. Humans are seekers by nature. We long for closeness, though sometimes we cling from fear rather than truth. I know I have.

And yet, over these ten years in Venice, I have met so many extraordinary people. You have shaped me. You have allowed me to live with what Buddhists call “right livelihood”—work that is honorable and sustaining, a source of pride and joy. I love creating for you all. I love writing to you all. Most of all, I love the community we have built together—the Heart-Minded Tribe.

Your families and neighborhoods are lucky to have you. And I am lucky to wrap you in scarves that carry the spirit of all these years.

Here is to the next ten.

With Love,

Matthew Schildkret

Founder, Creator, & Humble Guide

Late Sunday Afternoon