When The Dainty Pear Co. opened its first-ever brick-and-mortar location in Midway, Utah, in February 2025, it represented how large a dream can get, given time. With a lot of work and a few pivots, owner Sarah Clark grew her handmade jewelry business into a home goods store and local lifestyle brand, becoming a part of a community eager to accept what she offered.
In 2014, Clark began the company by creating hand-stamped jewelry. She hammered letters, numbers and symbols into metal pieces, assembling them onto chains or hooks. She spent a lot of time on her kitchen floor.
When she opened an Etsy shop to sell her wares, it was late in the year, already November. She thought people had probably already purchased their Christmas gifts, but she decided she’d take her chances with less-than-perfect timing anyway. That gamble worked in her favor, and she promptly received more orders than she could easily keep up with.
“It blew up,” Clark says. “Even when I had to go to bed at three in the morning and wake up at six to create more orders, it was a thrill connecting with my audience that way.” Taking her shop offline to catch up was always a looming possibility but never an option she used. She didn’t want to stop what was building. Momentum was a good thing.
As her kitchen-floor work continued, her Etsy shop audience grew. Her business and life continued to intertwine and started to evolve into other interests. What she wanted to offer under The Dainty Pear Co. name started to broaden. A kitchen line was an early idea that would allow Clark to include her lifelong passions for cooking and baking in her business. Actually making that shift, though, took time.
“I was so focused on doing jewelry, I wasn’t sure people would accept it if I switched lanes,” Clark says. “It created a mental block for me for a while. But, as soon as I did it, it felt like I was where I wanted to be.” After she had her fifth baby, Clark says she decided to “hang up jewelry and go all-in on a lifestyle blog and cooking.”
From good taste to great flavor
Those already close to Clark seemed poised to accept the new direction.
“My grandma always cooked, and our moms cooked. Once we got married and learned how to cook, we already had great examples to look to,” says Valory Dahlin, executive administrator at The Dainty Pear Co. and a cousin. “The direction Sarah took — switching from jewelry to recipes and curating for her shop and so on — is not even a little bit of a surprise.”
Dahlin shot all the photography for Clark’s cookbooks. Often a guest for their Sunday night family meals, Dahlin was the first to suggest that Clark create recipes for her meals so others could enjoy them.
“She’d make smoked pork loins, marinating them overnight, and they were always delicious,” Dahlin says. “I’d ask what she put in her marinade, and she’d never know. She was prone to making things up along the way.”
Clark started sharing videos of meals she made on Instagram when she began the culinary side of her company. Although her online following initially centered around her jewelry, people were intrigued by Clark’s food content, often asking questions about her techniques and recipes. At first, she struggled to answer them — she never followed recipes in the kitchen — but she started jotting down notes about the dishes she cooked and baked.
Clark spent the next three years creating and releasing two self-published cookbooks, each interspersed with photos of her family. She’s currently working on a third installment, GROUNDED, which is likely to be released in 2026.
As Clark dedicated more time to her cookbooks, she felt she was exactly where she needed to be. Her growing business and readership reflected that. “It’s kind of funny how we tell ourselves who we will or won’t be when we’re young,” Clark says of the shift. “But this made sense to do.”
From books to storefronts
Now, she just needed a store for people to gather and find her products in. Attempts were made for a few different properties over several years before Clark secured the spot where The Dainty Pear Co. lives today. When the barn where the All That Stuff In The Barn store used to be became available, she didn’t hesitate to put an offer down.
Once she’d secured the building, Clark began renovating using reclaimed wood from Fort Midway that dates back to the 1850s. She kept the property’s working-barn history intact by preserving the restaurant built into the old milking barn area behind the structure. Her team covered all external wood in a special shell to protect it from the elements.
Inside the store today, there’s a section for gourmet groceries — what Clark calls the store’s top-selling area — including various ingredients for her cookbook recipes. There’s a tinned fish section. There’s a wide variety of imported black licorice. There are even penny candy bins, allowing you to buy confections in bulk. Another local mercantile store started the penny candy tradition, and Clark’s decision to bring it back helps make it a memory for the newest generation.
“We need to safeguard that nostalgia or it gets lost,” Clark says. “I want people to have an experience [at the store], whether it’s a conversation with a friend they normally wouldn’t have had elsewhere or dinner with their family using olive oil they discovered and brought home. I envisioned people going in, having a coffee and food, chatting with their friends, all while connecting inside this historic space, one with so much warmth and history.”
She describes her store as a gathering spot for the community, which is set to grow with a cafe scheduled to be completed in 2025. Cooking classes have been requested, and monthly classes are set to follow. There are soft plans to allow for live music in the future and an area to write and send stamped letters, possibly connecting with a nearby nursing home as recipients.
The ideas point toward a community that needs a space to gather together. Clark believes her store can help fill that void and already does.
Carrie Baltz, COO of The Dainty Pear Co., agrees, “With the area growing so quickly and a lot of new people moving in, the community has been waiting for something like this: a reminder of their own travels around the world, of nostalgia, of yesterday — with a bit of a small town feel to it.”
While commerce will always loom, peddling wares doesn’t serve as Clark’s core driver.
“This business is bigger now than I ever thought it would be. It brings me joy, even when it’s stressful,” Clark says. “Believing in it allows me all the fuel I need to keep going.”
“I’ve talked to Sarah and [her husband] for years about their vision and all they’ve wanted to do,” Dahlin says. “I’m seeing their dreams come true after a lot of sleepless nights.”