Meet the Village: Caroline Weaver of The Locavore Variety Store

Meet Caroline Weaver, the owner of The Locavore Variety Store and creator of The Locavore Guide—an online directory of 14,000+ independent brick-and-mortar retailers in NYC.

What’s your name, and where do you work? 

My name is Caroline Weaver and I own the Locavore Variety store. 

And how long have you been on Sixth Ave? 

We have been on Sixth Avenue for a grand total of nine days!

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how you started this business? What inspired your decision to open The Locavore Variety Store? 

I also operate The Locavore Guide, which is kind of like Yellow Pages, but for independent retail only. I spent the past two years walking almost all of New York City to collect information on shops. We have over 14,000 shops in our database, and so this shop exists to be the physical manifestation of this idea of supporting a circular economy and shopping local.

We sell over 100 brands, the vast majority of which manufacture their products within 100 miles of New York City.

What is The Locavore Guide? 

The Locavore Guide is a website, thelocavore.com, and you can search it by borough, by neighborhood, by category, or by subcategory. Essentially, it helps you find shops that sell really specific things. It’s meant to encourage people to shop local more often and to give them the tools to find the shops more easily.

I’ve covered about 80% of the city and we have thousands of shops in the database in every category you could possibly imagine. We also do a lot of editorial content and educational content on what’s great about the shops in New York City and why it’s so important to shop locally.

Which products are you especially excited about right now? 

Well, I chose them all, so I love them all. But today I love—well, I always love—Wiffle ball, which most people probably do not realize is made in Shelton, Connecticut, by a family-owned business. So Wiffle ball is local. 

Right now, I’m really loving Zoca Lotion’s sunscreen. It’s SPF 36, it’s reef-safe, it’s zinc oxide based, and it goes on a really smooth. It smells amazing. It’s made in Rockaway Beach. It’s just a really fabulous product. 

From our pantry section, I love the Josephine’s Feast Wild Beach Plum Preserve. Beach Plum is a native plant to this region of the United States, and it’s so delicious and so special—and this is made in Brooklyn.

What excites you about working here in The Village? 

It’s just such a vibrant neighborhood, and this particular area is such a classic retail corridor. We’ve met so many amazing neighbors and everybody here is supportive and it’s just people who live in a neighborhood that they love, which is what I love most about it. I just wanted to feel like we’re part of a community that can support a business like this.