Allegory Gallery Moving to Our Forever Home

Hello! Our names are Andrew and William. We are creative business entrepreneurs who have had a small business in Ligonier for over 12 years called Allegory Gallery. After a series of personal hardships (including family members facing stage four cancer, William’s other job burning to the ground on Christmas morning, and other challenges), we have decided to move Allegory Gallery to Johnstown. We found a beautiful, historic building that has a storefront on the first floor and a rental on the second floor. We purchased the building last year with help from angel investors.

Currently we are fundraising for moving and startup costs. We started our first business on a shoestring budget and put in sweat equity to build it up to what it is today. With your generous help, we can lessen the financial burden on our existing business and can hit the ground running! Unfortunately our first business was negatively impacted by COVID-19 and our cat, who we recently lost, racked up quite the medical bills before she passed. This has made it incredibly difficult to save money to start the new business. We have applied for and are in the process of applying for small business grants, however, because the need is high and resources are limited, it is unlikely that we will be funded this way. The GoFundMe platform has empowered us to call upon our support system to create our own crowd-sources small business grant!

Here is what we will use the money for:

Brick and Mortar Location (exterior)

Brick and Mortar Location (interior)

Online Store/Social Media/Marketing

In addition to starting our new store, we are working on retrofitting our business model to transition into an S-Corp. This requires hiring a lawyer to file the appropriate paperwork and create initial documents and meeting minutes. Not only will this protect our existing businesses and holdings, but will also futureproof our new business and any future assets we might acquire.

Thank you so much for your consideration and help! We appreciate it so much! We feel very fortunate to be able to pursue this new venture and think that we could use our creative small business to help build community, empower people, and inspire healing in the neighborhood.