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Soap and Candle shop set to close after 13 years in Long Grove
Peg Ball, owner of the Long Grove Soap and Candle shop, plans to close in May to travel with her husband in retirement. | Ryan Pagelow~Sun-Times Media
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Updated: March 5, 2013 11:52AM
LONG GROVE — The road is calling, and the Balls will soon be rolling down it.
Peg Ball has owned the Long Grove Soap & Candle Company for 13 years, but recently decided to close up shop and retire. She said she would like to keep spending days in the aromatic building at 128 Old McHenry Road, but that it’s time to spend more time traveling the country with her husband, Claire.
“I still love it,” Ball said. “The economy has turned on everybody, which has made it a little more challenging, but that’s not the reason that we’re closing. We’re closing to do another chapter in our lives.
“It was just a whim,” she added. “I’d never owned a business before. It was something interesting, something different.”
In the eight years since she moved from another downtown Long Grove building to her current location, Ball has kept her store full of lotions and amenities from about 100 vendors. She offers some products aimed at men, but she said those are not her target customers.
“We have good product,” Ball said. “It’s a lady thing, definitely. We used to have a sign out front, ‘What women want.’”
But her husband, a retired research engineer, wanted more time together, traveling in retirement.
“He’s getting tired of me being here,” she said. “Our story is we’re going to travel the states. With me being here, we can’t do the things we want to do.”
Thus, Candle & Soap will close after business May 5, the final day of the Long Grove Chocolate Festival.
Ball said that as the end approaches, more of her stock will go on sale. She has already made her last orders from vendors, although she did not know at the time that those were be her last transactions.
“I was just going along like it was going to be another year, and then my husband said ‘You know, really, we need to think about this,’” she recalled.
And now the Balls will be moving on, together, though Peg said she will miss her years in Long Grove.
“I’m still talking to customers, I’m still having fun.”
