Barn Door Boutique expands in Ooltewah
Barn Door Boutique, a premium women’s clothing and accessory retail store in Ooltewah, is growing its 2,000-square-foot outlet at Cambridge Square by expanding into a vacated 1,000-square-foot storefront nearby to add more inventory.
Melissa Paryse, who purchased Barn Door Boutique in 2018 after working almost three decades in corporate banking, said she expects to open the expanded space in late October. Paryse and her daughter Alli Henry, who serves as marketing director, have grown the business over the past two years even as many brick-and-mortar retailer have struggled.
“While online retail continues to trend upward, an in-person shopping experience still has real value,” said Jim Cheney, marketing director at Cambridge. “Melissa and Alli understand this perhaps better than anyone else in the market, and we are thrilled to have such astute and forward-thinking operators. “
The store’s expansion will broaden Barn Door’s inventory offering, providing additional lines of shoes as well as home décor and gifts. Currently the store carries brands such as Nora Fleming, HoBo, Diba, Dear John, Spanx, TopFoxx, GoodR, and Pura Vida.
The expanded space is located adjacent to the existing store; the two spaces connected by a common outdoor plaza which Paryse intends to activate for photo shoots and both virtual and in-person shopping events.
“Cambridge Square has been a great fit for us,” said Paryse.
TVA among top utilities for growth
For the 15th consecutive year, the Tennessee Valley Authority has been cited by Site Selection magazine as one of the top utilities in the country for economic development.
In its list of the top 20 utilities, the magazine said TVA helped recruit $8.9 billion of investment and 66,500 jobs last year.
“The work goes on, attracting projects like Amazon’s 5,000-job operations center of excellence in Nashville, the single largest initial jobs announcement in TVA Economic Development’s storied history,” Site Selection said in its recognition of TVA. “Other investors include Mitsubishi Motors, VW, Corelle Brands and Pennington Stave & Cooperage.”
TVA’s Rural Leadership Institute continues to train economic developers, with 192 state, regional and local economic development professionals and local power company representatives having graduated from the program. TVA Economic Development unit also partnered with Atlas Integrated to develop Workforce IQ, a data visualization tool, to showcase workforce, industry and demographic information. Another new initiative is the Community Innovation Academy, which helps communities dive into concepts such as community collaboration, capacity-building models, ecosystem and asset mapping, prototyping and more.
Tech CEO to testify at Senate hearing
The CEOs of technology giants Facebook, Google and Twitter are expected to testify for an Oct. 28 Senate hearing on tech companies’ control over hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.
The Senate Commerce Committee voted last week to authorize subpoenas for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Google and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to force them to testify if they didn’t agree to do so voluntarily. Spokespeople for the companies said Monday that the CEOs will cooperate.
Nvidia to build UK supercomputer
Graphics chip maker Nvidia plans to build Britain’s fastest supercomputer that healthcare researchers can use to work on medical problems including COVID-19.
Nvidia said Monday it will spend $52 million on the supercomputer, dubbed Cambridge-1. It will consist of 80 Nvidia systems and is expected to be online by the end of the year.
Nvidia’s CEO said Cambridge-1 will be available to healthcare researchers using artificial intelligence to working on urgent medical challenges. The announcement comes after the company said last month it agreed to buy U.K.-based chip designer Arm Holdings for up to $40 billion.