DOWAGIAC — Tracy Saylor loves words — especially the kind that speak over a home.

With such a fascination with words, Saylor’s and her daughter, Robin Bowman’s, business, Salted Words, is all about meticulously incorporating words on signs and selling them online through e-commerce website Etsy. The website is well-known for handmade and vintage items, crafts and supplies.

Now with renovations taking place in their building at 313 E. Division St., the former Division Tire in Dowagiac, the mother-daughter duo is ready to take their online business local.

Bowman was still in high school when wooden signs were starting to become a trend, and Saylor wanted to learn how to make the signs with her daughter. The pair made a few, but the desire quickly died down.

“We’ve had a lot of stops and starts,” Saylor said, now sitting in the white-walled space that will soon house their sign creations.

After high school, Saylor’s four children moved to Grand Rapids. The loss of her 21-year-old son in a car accident drew Saylor and Bowman back into sign making as a creative outlet. In honor of her son and Bowman’s brother, the duo started buying tools and in 2009 called the business Ryan’s Place. Again, the business slightly faded away due to other commitments.

Bowman attended Aveda Cosmetology, got married, moved back home and had a baby. She approached her mother one day about starting the sign-making business again in 2013.

“So, we did and listed them on Etsy as Ryan’s Place Home Décor,” Saylor said. “We started getting some business. I remember our first sale. It was two signs that read, ‘I am the daughter of the king.’ It’s this poem that my cousin showed me. We were going to try to resurrect Ryan’s Place.”

A year after Ryan’s Place, Saylor was working at a restaurant when she had an idea for another sign business focused on larger signs. She believed God had given her the name Salted Words through a Bible verse, Colossians 4:6, which reads, “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”

“Salt enhances the flavor of food,” Saylor said. “If we focus on the words that we use and enhance them, it will be appealing and appetizing to people who are listening. What better name for a sign shop than “Salted Words?’”

Saylor said Bowman was always game for any of her “crazy, hair-brained” plans, and thus Salted Words launched in 2014.

The business started in Saylor’s house. Bowman’s childhood bedroom became an office and packaging room, and a back stall in Saylor’s three-car garage became a workshop.

“It was the tiniest little space,” Saylor said. “We started making the memories of Salted Words there.”

Bowman, who grew up in Dowagiac, always had a draw to the old Division Tire Building. Eventually, the property came up for auction, but the pair let it pass.

“Everyone in our lives was like, ‘No, that place needs to be bulldozed,’” Bowen said.

Later, Bowman did some research on the owner, and the pair spoke with him for several months. They ended up land contracting the space for more than a year and started gutting it out. It was only the first layer of many roadblocks the pair would face.

“The very first day we came here, we prayed at all the cars that drove by and the house across the street,” Saylor said. “Our pastor came. He didn’t like it either, but he still prayed over it.”

The pair ended up buying the property, despite their peers’ objections. They have now owned the space for three years.

“Robin and I are the only two people who have seen the vision for this place. I lost my vision several times,” Saylor said. “Robin never has.”

They reached out to an architect who drew up plans, which the pair ended up not using. However, through the process, they learned.

“Reaching out to the architect made it serious and real,” Saylor said.

Next, the pair had an environmental test done on the building. The owners, sought a final answer on if they should continue to pursue their dream. The environmental tester said Saylor and Bowman did not own the driveway next to the building, which would cause issues moving forward.

“We go home. Robin is upset. She wants the building. I prayed for clarity and a clear vision of what was going on,” Saylor said. “We were home for not even an hour. She calls back and says the satellite was wrong and skewed a hair, so we owned the driveway.”

From that moment on, Saylor knew the building would come to fruition.

“I’ve prayed that several times, ‘if it’s not meant to be, take it. It’s too much for any one person to deal with,’” Bowman said. “Every time, the other side of that is, ‘here you go.’ I don’t know if God is trying to teach us to be okay with letting something go. I don’t know. I’ve had to let this place go lots of times in my mind.”

The past few years have involved the pair bartering with others for labor and figuring out their woodworking and carpentry.

In spring 2020, the pair predicts the space will be completed. Their dream is to use the space as an “unconventional retail space.” At the shop, they would like to host DIY classes, events for children, various meetings and exercise classes.

“We want it to be a source of entertainment for Dowagiac,” Bowman said.

“It’s going to be whatever we want it to be,” Saylor added. “If nothing else, I feel that we should not box ourselves in.”

The pair said the journey of renovating the building had tested them.

“My faith has been faltering, [Robin’s] faith is being increased,” Saylor said. “It has not been pretty, but the outcome is beautiful.”