For Danielle Hastings, moving to Lansing from Jackson in 2018 marked a sort of rebirth.
“I was getting out of a domestic violence situation, and Lansing was kind of my restart and refresh from that,” she said. “That’s where I discovered the importance of self-care and was able to rehabilitate my mental health, because those situations can do a lot to a person and can impact anyone.”
That self-care journey led Hastings to take up new hobbies, one of which was soapmaking. In 2020, she began selling her artisan vegan soaps, plus other personal-care items like lotions, shower scrubs, bath robes and candles, through a digital shop she named Sylvia’s Sudsery in honor of her late grandmother Sylvia Oeschger.
Near the end of 2021, Hastings signed on to participate in Downtown Lansing Inc.’s Middle Village retail accelerator program. She participated in the program from 2022 to 2023, after which she began scouting out a storefront of her own. In January, she finally found the right fit in a 2,200-square-foot space on South Washington Square that housed Linn & Owen Jewelers, a staple of downtown Lansing that had been in business for 107 years but was set to close.