Our Story
Where we started
We're Chelsea and Clarke, founders and creators behind Olive & Blueberry's Mercantile. OBM, as we like to call her, was first imagined in the desert of Southern California, in 2023. At the time, we were living a nomadic lifestyle, and we started this business not only to create income while on the road, but as an outlet for our creative spirits.
We both have a deep desire to create, to craft, and to use our hands and creativity to interact with and experience this life. And, because our interests are varied and evolve with the seasons and with our exposure to the world, we thought a Mercantile was most fitting for our niche-less souls.
Since its first imagining, we have made several attempts to get OBM up and running…seriously, this is our fourth or so meaningful push to make Olive & Blueberry’s Mercantile an actual online shop. Living on the road, in a small truck camper, without a permanent address, and being constantly on the move made it difficult to "set up shop," as they say. But, even as we traversed thousands of kilometers throughout Canada and the U.S., the vision for Olive & Blueberry's Mercantile always remained clear in our minds, if not also a little hole in our hearts.
So, you reading this is a big deal for us! And, we are deeply, deeply appreciative for you to be here, to click around the OBM shop, and lay your eyeballs on the art and provisions created and conceived, quite literally, all over the North American continent.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Also, woot!
Where we are now
Life on the road, living as nomads, both together and separately, is an experience we are grateful to have had. But, it was never the long-term goal. It was a necessary part of the journey, which brought us to each other as well as the place we had been longing for, but had not yet found despite looking nearly everywhere…home.
At the end of 2025, we found our little dot on the map, a piece of earth to put down roots, literally and figuratively, and build a life we have been dreaming about for decades. Our little piece of earth is in Nova Scotia, a beautiful and rural place of forests, lakes, and ocean. This wonderful place we now get to call home is almost as far away from that dry, cactus-filled desert in Southern California, where Olive & Blueberry's Mercantile was conceived, as one can get on mostly good roads.
With our homestead and the new found stability it provides, if one can call starting a homestead from scratch “stability,” we can shift our focus from: gas stations, rest stops, parking lot sleep spots, and, when the universe smiled upon us, some truly epic sleep spots to: building a cabin, building a greenhouse, planting a garden, learning the forest, befriending some chickens and ducks, building community, painting...creating. Living. But, living in a new way….living with our feet finally firmly planted.
And, now in early Spring of 2026, with an address and space to store tools, paints, shipping envelopes and the like, we now feel ready to bring Olive & Blueberry's Mercantile to life, in what we think is the fourth, maybe the fifth, iteration since her desert conception.
Where we're heading
Olive & Blueberry's Mercantile is very much a reflection of and an integrated part of the life we want to live and, by extension, the life we are building. Our intention for OBM is to create a space where we can nurture our creativity while having an outlet where we can make good trades for dollars and cents so that we can live as simply as possible.
I mean, a life free from money seems the simplest way to live, but….well, here we are. So….yeah.
But, the vision goes far beyond generating a small income. We hope to evolve this creative outlet into a space that fosters the creativity of others, encourages a meaningful slow-down of it all, and cultivates a community of makers, crafters, and artists.
We've got lots of ideas! So, please join us and let's see together where this journey takes us.
If you’re still reading, we appreciate you! So, thank you, friend. We hope you have a wonderful day!