“I could not sit behind a desk all day,” declares Jessica Kramer, co-owner of Preston Center’s Kids Next Door boutique.
“I’m not the corporate type. If I had to get dressed up to go to work every day, I probably wouldn’t go.”
But while most of us would balk at donning a swimsuit to work, that is precisely what this 32-year-old wife and mother of two prefers.
Kramer doesn’t mean the pool like you and I mean “the pool.” The pool is where she goes for 12 weeks each summer to teach young children how to swim, an endeavor she is as committed to as the store she owns.
During an attempt some years ago to integrate with the corporate world through what those close to her refer to as “the real job” (in advertising), Kramer quickly realized that her interests were not fit to size with typical jobs.
“I wanted to work part-time and still teach swimming, and they were like, ‘no, you can’t do that,’ and I said, ‘you know what? See ya! I’d rather be in the pool all day than here with you guys.’”
“My parents are real big into volunteer work. When we were off at camp, my parents would let the visually impaired use our pool for lessons, so it’s kind of always been a part of our lives,” she says.
As it happens, two summers after she graduated from camp, Kramer asked her parents if she could help with swimming lessons being given in their backyard.
“I really enjoyed it and said, ‘I’d really like to do this.’”
Her father, a retired pediatrician, told her that one of his patients did something similar for a living, and for the following 10 years, Kramer joined with this woman to teach swimming until the woman moved to Florida and offered the young girl her business. So, in 1994, fresh out of college, Kramer took over the swimming school and began devoting her time to what she believed was more of a “real job” than anything the suits still hanging with price tags in her closet would have been used for.
The summer of that first year, armed with the money she saved from her swimming instruction, Kramer was invited to invest with a neighbor in opening a children’s store. The business wasn’t new to Kramer, who had worked retail throughout high school and college. The store does, however, venture into new territory by eschewing the more traditional look of baby fare for the more fun and funky look of the shabby chic baby.
As Kramer puts it, the store contains “one or two traditional things, but we’re a lot more fashion forward,” a move that sets the store decidedly apart from the pack.
A graduate of English and Latin American studies from SMU, Kramer had secretly thought she’d end up going to medical school.
“I always wanted to be a pediatrician like my dad; I love kids. But,” she laments, “I’d be 45 or 50 before I got into practice, so I decided to open a children’s store instead.”
“I love my customers. I consider some of these people not just my customers, but my friends.”
And family and familiarity go hand in hand for this Preston Hollow resident and native who admits she’s attached to this area.
“I love it. I moved a mile from where I grew up. I grew up at Preston and Walnut, and I live at Preston and Royal. Everything I do is right along Preston Road.”
Kramer and her husband – a San Francisco native who after a long-term, long-distance courtship finally realized he would have to be the one to move – have two little girls, two years and 6 months.
“He was trying to get me to move out to San Francisco, and I was like, ‘uh-uh. I’m here, my parents are here, most of my family lives here,’” And the couple’s kids appear to be following the Kramer family trend of gleaning lessons from their parents – “my little one will take shoes off shelves (at the store) and take them up to little kids,” she laughs.
