Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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The Planning & Zoning Commission at its most recent meeting decided to forego approving two signs for new businesses that had been submitted to the town (see photos above). Commissioner Elizabeth DeLuca, head of P&Z’s sign committee, said that a sign for Spiga, the new Italian restaurant opening on Main Street, was meant to be “burnt orange” according to its application “but it appears to be a very bright orange color.”

“They put it up,” DeLuca said at the July 26 meeting. “It’s up. It’s there.”

Though P&Z did not specify just why, the group also forewent voting either way on a new sign for the New Canaan Psychic, to open at 179 Cherry St. Regarding Siga, Town Planner Steve Kleppin noted window signage and said that it is more attractive than banners inside downtown businesses that hang behind the glass.

Business

‘An Aspirational Brand at Achievable Prices’: New Canaan’s Mellick Family Launches ‘Beachmate’

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In a way, New Canaan’s Beatrice and Jeff Mellick have their first-born to thank for the idea that—as of Wednesday afternoon—became a public-facing, live retail enterprise. Now a West School first-grader, Phoebe was four years old on the afternoon in August 2013 when, on the beach near the Mellick family’s longtime summer home in Charlestown, R.I., she asked her dad to make a “huge hole,” “big huge sandcastle” and a “moat that goes all the way down the water,” Jeff Mellick recalled. He dutifully said “Of course, sweetheart,” drove his pickup truck to a hardware store, bought a garden shovel, headed back to the beach, finished his project in 20 minutes and “actually got to sit down and relax for 30 minutes straight as my daughter, Phoebe, and my son, Emmett, played for 30 minutes straight—which had never really happened before.”

“And so after that, every day, three or four different dads would come up to me on the beach and ask to borrow my shovel,” Jeff Mellick said on a recent morning from an office in downtown New Canaan. “So the light bulb went off.”

It went off and this week—after two-and-half years and countless hours of hard work, creativity, anxiety, focus groups, searches, frustration and excitement—that light bulb yielded The Beachmate System. Hands-free, lightweight at less than eight pounds and with a stylish design that experts say lends itself to an expanded product line (more on that below), Beachmate includes a set of durable ABS plastic buckets and shovels as well as a cooler, all wrapped in a tote bag (insignia optional) with a shoulder strap.