What began as a side interest in furniture and antiques eventually pulled Cheryl Hamond away from a 20-year nonprofit career. Six years after buying Pond Road Market, she is preserving what people love about the antique business while finding new ways to keep it moving forward.
Photography by Molly Byron
Long before Cheryl Hamond considered herself an entrepreneur, she kept a folder at the Mankato Family YMCA filled with ideas.
She jokingly called it her crazy folder.
Hamond had spent much of her career at the Y, beginning as a program coordinator and eventually becoming director of social responsibility. Part of her work involved fundraising, which regularly sent her looking for new ways to support programs.
One idea kept resurfacing.
“I would bring it up during budget time, like, ‘Hey, let’s open a HomeGoods thrift store where members can donate their stuff, and we’re gonna sell it, and then we’ll give it back to all the programs for the kids,’” Hamond recalled.
The idea never went anywhere at the Y.
Then, sitting in a leadership class one day, Hamond had another thought.
“I could probably do this on my own.”
So she started small.
Hamond began flipping furniture and eventually selling furniture paint. She rented space in another store before becoming a vendor at Pond Road Market, an occasional-sale antique and home decor business south of Mankato.
Within about a year, its owners asked if she’d like to buy the business.
Hamond’s answer was no.
“I work nonprofit,” she remembers thinking. “I have a professional job.”
But the idea stayed with her.
After roughly 20 years in nonprofit work, Hamond began wondering whether she was ready for something entirely different.
Eventually, she decided she was.
She left the YMCA and bought Pond Road Market.
A month later, COVID arrived.
Learning the Business
Ron and Terry Saye had been buying and selling antiques long before Hamond came along.
Pond Road Market itself began near Hiniker Pond before eventually moving to its current Highway 22 location at 19949 MN-22, south of Mankato. The name followed it.
The Sayes established the occasional-sale format that remains part of the business today. Pond Road opens its Highway 22 location for four days each month, giving its vendors the weeks between sales to find inventory, clean and repair pieces and reset their spaces.
By the time Hamond became involved, the Sayes were ready to step away from running the business. They sold it to Hamond roughly six years ago, but never really left.
They still own the property.
And they’re still vendors.
For Hamond, that has provided something more valuable than a clean transition.
She’s had teachers.
Ron and Terry brought decades of knowledge about antiques. Other longtime vendors did too. Hamond brought a different set of skills.
“When I started, they were handwriting everything, like receipts,” she said.
Hamond began introducing new systems and a more contemporary approach to merchandising. At the same time, she leaned on longtime dealers when an unfamiliar piece came through the door.
“I don’t know everything,” she said.
That exchange has helped Pond Road evolve without losing what made it interesting in the first place.
An Antique Store That Changes
Hamond has a fairly vivid description of the kind of antique store she doesn’t want Pond Road Market to become.
“You go in there one time and you go in there a year later and it looks the same,” she said.
She wanted movement.
Today, roughly two dozen vendors operate between Pond Road’s two Mankato locations, sourcing merchandise from estate sales, auctions and private sellers. Some travel considerably farther. Hamond has vendors who have sourced in other states and even Europe.
The result is a mix that stretches beyond traditional antiques.
Vintage clothing can sit alongside jewelry, furniture, home decor and new merchandise. A customer interested in antiques can shop with someone who couldn’t care less about them and both can find something.
The monthly format at the Highway 22 store helps too.
“We sell a lot during the sale,” Hamond said. “People come as kind of like an event.”
Then the vendors start over.
Hamond also encourages reasonable pricing rather than allowing merchandise to linger indefinitely. The objective isn’t to fill a booth and admire it.
It’s to sell something and go find the next thing.
Even the market for old furniture has changed since she entered the business.
“When I started, everything was painted,” Hamond said.
She painted furniture herself, although she avoided painting quality wood pieces that remained in good condition.
Today, she sees customers moving back toward natural wood.
“I actually don’t sell as much paint as I used to,” she said. “People are leaning into more of the brown furniture.”
For Hamond, some of the appeal is practical. Furniture built generations ago has already demonstrated its durability.
Some pieces at Pond Road have been around for more than a century.
They’re still solid.
The Stories Attached
Spend enough time around antiques and eventually someone recognizes something.
Hamond hears variations of the same sentence constantly.
“My grandma had that.”
Sometimes it’s an aunt. Sometimes it’s something that sat in the family kitchen. The object can unlock a memory before the customer even knows whether they want to buy it.
Occasionally, the connection gets remarkably specific.
Years ago, a Pond Road customer purchased an old Valentine’s Day card. Written on it was the signature of the customer’s great-aunt.
The discovery eventually attracted the attention of KARE 11.
Other objects require someone to explain what they were in the first place.
Hamond recently encountered an item identified as a “silent butler.” She didn’t know what that meant.
An older woman standing nearby did.
The small covered pan was once used to collect cigarette ash and debris, an ordinary household object from an era when smoking was far more common.
Hamond has increasingly come to appreciate the knowledge attached to the merchandise she sells.
During a visit to an antique store in northern Minnesota, an older dealer explained the history behind items marked “Occupied Japan” and the period that produced them.
Hamond found herself thinking about what happens when people with that knowledge are no longer around to share it.
“It’s intriguing to me to learn why we have some of the things that we have,” she said.
Four Months Becomes Five Years
The occasional-sale model works well for Pond Road’s Highway 22 location, but it came with a drawback.
The store was missing some of the biggest shopping days of the year.
Small Business Saturday might fall on the wrong weekend. So could other holiday events.
Hamond came up with another experiment.
She would open a temporary holiday market in Old Town Mankato.
Working with Cate DeBates, Hamond found space at 411 N. Riverfront Drive in a former hardware store. The plan was to stay for three or four months, capture holiday traffic and then close.
Customers had other ideas.
“It was just gonna be a temporary thing,” Hamond said. “We opened and people loved it.”
That was nearly five years ago.
The Old Town location stayed.
Its personality has developed somewhat differently from the Highway 22 store. The smaller space lends itself to vintage clothing, jewelry and items customers can browse while walking through Old Town.
And because the property has traditional retail zoning, Pond Road can open more frequently for events and other busy weekends.
Two stores hadn’t been the plan.
Neither was a third.
Taking the Idea to St. Peter
This one started with dirty soda.
After encountering the increasingly popular drink concept, Hamond tried dirty soda pop-ups at Pond Road.
Customers responded.
The original idea was to add a soda operation to the Old Town store. But parking requirements and other considerations made converting the space more complicated than Hamond believed the idea could justify.
So she and Jason started looking elsewhere.
A small St. Peter location initially seemed possible. Then DeBates mentioned another property nearby.
The building at 101 S. Minnesota Avenue had previously housed a Century 21 office before suffering a fire. It had been vacant for years.
Hamond liked the historic exterior.
The inside was another matter.
“Absolutely not,” she remembers thinking. “We are not buying this. Too much work.”
Jason saw something else.
“Oh, I can see it,” he told her.
They spent the next week going back and forth.
Hamond returned to the building.
This time, she could see it too.
They bought it.
For roughly nine months, the Hamonds have been bringing the building back, doing much of the work themselves while hiring contractors for projects they felt needed professional expertise.
The first floor will become Pond Road Market’s third location, combining vintage, antique and new merchandise in the front with dirty soda in the back. Hamond is also exploring Swedish candy as part of the mix.
Upstairs is another project for another day. The space was gutted following the fire, and Hamond envisions eventually renovating it, potentially as a short-term rental.
St. Peter has welcomed the project, she said, including pointing the Hamonds toward grant opportunities as they work through the redevelopment.
That support has made an impression.
“We’ve kind of fallen in love with St. Peter,” Hamond said.
She also doesn’t want Pond Road to arrive simply duplicating something another local business already does.
“We’re really careful of not coming in and taking away from what they already have going on,” she said. “What don’t they have? Let’s bring that to the table.”
The goal is to open the new location later this fall.
The Things Worth Keeping
Looking backward, Hamond can see signs that this career may not have been as unexpected as it once seemed.
At the YMCA, some of the work she enjoyed most involved starting things. She helped create new programs, including STRIDE. She filled that crazy folder with ideas.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “But I’m like, that’s an entrepreneur.”
Jason has become an important part of what she’s building now. Hamond owns Pond Road Market, while her husband handles much of the work happening behind the scenes, from bookkeeping and repairs to helping stage merchandise.
Sometimes a customer compliments a display and Hamond has to give him the credit.
“I think he stages better than me,” she said.
For someone who spends so much time thinking about what other people might want in their homes, Hamond’s own home is surprisingly simple.
What she keeps there isn’t necessarily valuable in the traditional antique-store sense.
A large cabinet came from Ron and Terry Saye. It matters because they were the people who entrusted her with Pond Road Market.
She has pieces connected to Ethiopia, where she was born while her parents were serving as missionaries. Stained glass reminds her of her father, who was a pastor.
The pieces don’t necessarily match.
They don’t need to.
“The things that I have in my home remind me of the people that I love and the things that I love and times of my life that I love,” Hamond said.
For a woman who makes a living surrounded by old things, perhaps that’s the simplest explanation for why they still matter.