She made herself a local

The pandemic paused her promotional-products company, Bamm! She and her husband, Dave Pavlik, opened Seaside Slushies & Dogs on Broadway in August 2020 — slushies, loaded hot dogs, hand-dipped corn dogs, chili — and later a sit-down room a block away. On Valentine’s Day 2022 she opened Crafted in Seaside. It started with eight local artists. It has grown past twenty-five. Kerri Lambert, who runs the SDDA and the Times Theatre, put the arrival in a sentence the town still repeats: “Dawn made herself a local immediately through her volunteering and her big heart. She is so helpful and so much fun to be around. You want her on your committees. She gets it done.”

Fifteen Broadway. Sunday through Thursday ten to five, Friday and Saturday ten to six. Retro on one table, local work on the next: resin, jewelry, aprons, journals, driftwood, Pee-Chee-inspired gear, cutting boards, the custom press that will put a vacation photo on a tumbler. Pets welcome. “The store is so stimulating with all the shapes and colors,” Fujiwara-Pavlik has said. In the studio, heat-transfer printing; on the calendar, Meet the Maker and Craft and Sip. She has taught clay mermaids raku-fired on the beach, and junk journals, and the particular Seaside skill of turning a weekend into an object you can still hold in November.

The SDDA’s own camera has already been through the shop. Their clip is the civic version of a review: support local artists, bring the dog, do not skip the workshops. Visitors write about Dawn by name — the advice on a custom print, the gift they would not have found at the Turnaround. The customer is often a person who came for the Prom and is leaving with someone else’s work in a bag. That is the point of a maker floor on Broadway.

“Seaside is one of the most close-knit communities I have ever been a part of,” she has said. “We look out for each other, and the businesses are supportive and collaborative.” If you want a magnet of the beach, there are other doors. If you want a thing a person here made, this is the door. Free parking is less than two blocks. And if you live here, the committees she sits on — Chamber, SDDA, Rotary — are how the hanging baskets happen. The shop is the visible half.