REXBURG — Gretl Dixon is the owner of Bear Lite Media, a bookstore and storefront for handmade quilts and pajamas. She’s also business consultant who holds success seminars, and she teaches family history.

Bear Lite Media is located at 20 N. First W. across the street from the local Broulim’s supermarket. It used to be located on West Main Street where Brodi’s Hair Tanning and Nail Salon is now and was owned by Dixon’s uncle.

“Ten years ago, it began,” Dixon said. “I was working for a business company designing their website and in nine months I read 22 business books. And then I walked away from that company because of dishonesty. And everyone said, ‘Use it,’ so I wrote my first workshop and that was 'Success: Seven Steps to Success Using Success.'”

She said that after writing the workshop, life became a little crazy and then she moved to Rexburg, where she inherited the bookstore from her uncle who, she said, was bored with it.

“He gave it to me. My sister owns LazyOne, and she sent me some of their discontinued pajamas to kind of give me a balance until I could get the workshops off their feet and kind of get people to understand,” Dixon said. “So the bookstore is the physical presence, but it’s kind of the minor part at this point.”

The bookstore is open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Between customers, she works on designer quilts and teaches family history. In the afternoon, she coaches those looking to start a business or who need business advice. Mondays are her planning days in which she unpacks shipments and plans her workshops. On Tuesday, she goes to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Temple and finds a balance to all that she does.

Dixon studied criminology in college as well as anthropology, and she has worked with special needs individuals for 25 years.

“We don’t give them enough credit,” she said. “If you talk to them on their level, they understand everything, but you have to be willing to change it up. And that’s what ‘Success’ was. Success is one of those confusing terms. ‘What the heck is success?’ people ask me all the time. So I teach them. We actually start by telling them that failure and success are not opposites; they are the same side of the same coin because you always achieve something. Now, did you achieve everything you wanted? Maybe not, maybe not. But you did achieve something. And I use seven great minds in history to show how they overcame their own failures and were the successes that we know them as today.”

Dixon said that in her workshops they find a working definition of success for every individual in attendance.

“What is your definition of success today?” she said. “Not what will it be tomorrow, not what it was yesterday, but what is it today? And I will help you learn the steps to achieve it and I make sure at the end they’re aware this is today's; it will change.”

Her seminars take nine hours and can be done in nine weeks or three days. People can do it in one day but only when absolutely necessary.

Dixon's passion for designer quilts and sewing started at a young age.

“I was one of those lucky ones,” she said. “I’m a fourth-generation sewer, so by the time I was 2 or 3 years old, I would sit at my mom's feet as she sewed. It started with stringing buttons. That’s how she started all of us. 'Here’s my miscellaneous button jar and here’s a piece of yarn. Go string buttons while I finish this project.' And by the time I was 12, I had my own sewing machine. I picked it up at an estate sale on vacation, actually.”

She still has her first sewing machine and uses it to this day.

“It’ll sew anything — all I have to do is change the needle,” Dixon said. “It’ll sew from cotton to canvas to tapestry. All I do is put a different needle in. It doesn’t skip a beat. It does basic stitches, but sometimes that’s all I need.”

As a young woman, she went on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When she got home, her mom said she needed a quilt for their California king bed. Dixon and her sister took on the challenge and made a quilt for their bed in six weeks. This was the first quilt she had ever made, and her love for the craft took off from there.

She hopes that one day she can continue with her workshops and the quilting will be more of a hobby and less a business.

Dixon's sister and her husband started LazyOne, and they usually sell at big boutiques.

"These are your animal pajamas that you’re gonna see at Jackson, Yellowstone, Bearworld," Dixon said. "They usually sell at these big boutiques. Well, I was their warehouse manager for five years, and business doubled every year I worked for them."

Dixon said her sister has an outlet store in Logan, Utah, and brought her items that were discontinued, the wrong color, not selling well or not the right animal for the right place — for example, a pair of alligator pajamas in Yellowstone. Dixon knew the product well, and her sister felt that Dixon would have no problem selling them.

She said a lot of the traffic she gets is from travelers headed to the mountains who stop by Broulim’s for groceries and then see her store across the street and come in looking for a book to read on their journey.

In regards to selling books, she says bookstores are making a comeback. She said people are starting to open up bookstores all over the country, and people have started to realize that they miss the feeling of turning a page.

Dixon said she isn’t a fan of entities like Amazon and finds them difficult to work with. She does, however, work well with the other bookstore in town, BookViking. She said that Bear Lite Media has texts like Shakespeare, and BookViking has the science textbooks and more technical items that students need, so they refer students to each other.

Dixon said that she does have older science textbooks. When the eclipse came a few years ago, she had scientists from all over the world ask to look at her textbooks to compare how studies were in the past compared to today, and many have said they’re still viable, so she keeps them in stock at her store.

For information on Bear Lite Media, visit their website at bear-lite-media.business.site or Bear Lite Media on Facebook.