Build-A-Bear’s 10-year turnaround: How the company quietly became one of the world’s top specialty retailers
By Payton Turkeltaub Medill Reports From the day the first Build-A-Bear Workshop store opened in the Saint Louis Galleria Mall in 1997 to a line around the corner of parents and children waiting to be the inaugural customers, founder and former CEO Maxine Clark knew she had done something right. A month later, it was […]
PHOTOS: ‘More than a sport’: Irish Gaelic games grow, build community in Chicago
By Tom O’Connor Medill Reports Far from Ireland, Gaelic games are thriving in Chicago even as the number of U.S. residents born in Ireland fell between 2009 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Players with and without Irish roots are building communities around these centuries-old traditions, despite resource challenges and competition from mainstream […]