The people of the (very active) Cole Valley neighborhood Facebook group wanted the old Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy building at 925 Cole St. to be a daycare. Or a new restaurant. Something useful would be nice, after five years of the building sitting vacant. What they got instead, they didn’t quite understand: In 2025 the cavernous space was rented by Yardsale, an outdoor equipment and apparel brand whose flagship product is modular ski poles embedded with magnets for easy transportation on the slopes. The location was set to be transformed into a half-store-half-cafe, a tastefully Frankensteined shoppy shop that Yardsale co-founder Kelly McGee hoped would become the “living room of Cole Valley.”
The general reaction from the neighborhood: …What?
“We got a lot of interesting commentary when we first started sharing what we were doing here. People were like, ‘I don’t get it,’ or ‘I wish it was something else,’” said Christina Ashbaugh, McGee’s co-founder.
After more than six months of construction and permitting-related delays, the Yardsale store and its in-house cafe, Double Black, is finally open for business, and the neighborhood seems to have come around almost immediately. Earlier this week, Ashbaugh posted in the Facebook group announcing the opening. “All the comments are like, ‘I was prepared to be a hater, but it’s actually really good,’” Ashbaugh said.
Since Yardale’s soft opening on Wednesday, a steady stream of well-to-do tech workers in their early 30s, strollers and labradoodles in tow, have flocked to the shop to buy a coffee and peruse the wares in the sun-drenched space.
Every day this week, Yardsale opened at 8 a.m. to a line out the door.
“When I heard it was going to be a ski pole store, I was like, ‘That’s an interesting choice,’” said Kendall Cody, a 34-year-old marketing director for a venture capital firm. Cody was sitting with her dog Dipsea on the sunny windowsill under the large storefront window that opens like a garage door. “But I was glad to hear there would be coffee.”
Katie Fisher, a 34-year-old product manager, who in all seriousness said she was “probably going to have a baby tomorrow,” said the opening had been so highly anticipated in her Cole Valley moms’ group chat that she and her husband had made sure to swing by before heading to the hospital.
Ashbaugh said almost everything Yardsale stocked has a local story. They source their espresso beans from Linea Caffe, and their drip beans from Cole Valley garage roastery Bird & Bear. Their baked goods come from Saltwater Bakeshop in SoMa. She and McGee picked up the more quaint décor, like rusty ski poles and tin first-aid kits, from the monthly Alameda Point Antiques Faire.
Among the Yardsale sweaters, weekender bags, and baseball caps that say “full send” across the front, the shop also offers a smattering of spiritually similar, outdoorsy things, often from founders they’re friends with. You can pick up stylish binoculars from San Francisco-based brand Nocs Provisions, a coffee table book of photos of saunas, or sunscreen in a chic aluminum tube from Los Angeles brand Utu.
The space itself has the sort of quintessentially modern SF feel — exposed brick walls, gleaming terracotta subway tiles, blond wood co-working tables, an abundance of power outlets — patrons of places like The Mill, Tartine Inner Sunset, and Sightglass Coffee have grown accustomed to over the last fifteen years. (All of those spaces, like Yardsale, were designed by Studio BBA, a firm that has also helped create a number of corporate lobbies and breakrooms downtown.)
When I visited the store in January, back when it was still an active construction zone, Ashbaugh said she was using The Mill as inspiration for the look and feel of Yardsale’s first brick-and-mortar location. (The company primarily sells direct-to-consumer online and has wholesale contracts with REI, Vail Resorts, and online retailer Backcountry.) She and McGee even poached “at least two” baristas from The Mill, pre-fire, including their head barista, Ale Aguirre.
Prior to launching Double Black, neither Ashbaugh, 29, nor McGee, 30, had ever worked in the food industry. Before they founded Yardsale from McGee’s Cole Valley apartment in 2023, Ashbaugh was a marketer for tech and venture capital firms; McGee, a product designer at Apple.
In 2024, the pair hawked their magnetic ski poles on Shark Tank, where they won a $250,000 investment from Texas-based jewelry mogul Kendra Scott.
They added that to their handful of “friends and family investors,” which in January Ashbaugh said had collectively invested around $700,000. (They noted that their roster of shareholders does not include their parents.) In May, they closed what they consider their first true fundraising round; they declined to share numbers and the names of investors but said they categorically do not take venture capital. “We have a lot of friends that have started companies that have raised money from VCs, and you just become beholden to them,” Ashbaugh explained.
Until last year, online sales and wholesale contracts had kept them in the black, but once they got the idea to open up a home base in Cole Valley, they knew they’d need something to drive day-to-day business in a way that $180 après-ski outerwear could not. “The coffee business can actually be quite profitable,” Ashbaugh said. Plus, they liked the idea of running a cozy cafe. Neither co-founder has ever been a barista, but among their white collar milieu, McGee said, “it’s like everyone’s dream job.”
Opening an IRL store proved to be exceedingly tedious. Last winter, they told the press it would open in the spring, but they repeatedly failed their city inspections. “Some of it was our fault,” Ashbaugh conceded, like leaving a tiny chunk of the flooring undone, or failing to make their dressing room ADA-compliant. Consequently, they pushed the opening date back, one week at a time, for months. The building, which they share with Finnegans Wake and Zazie, also had to be re-roofed. Last Thursday, construction debris fell into the store through a skylight and ruined about $30,000 worth of inventory. “It was a disaster,” Ashbaugh said.
For another small business, $30,000 of ruined stock could have been a fatal blow, nevermind paying rent through months of delays, but Yardsale seems particularly charmed despite its setbacks. As she recounted each challenge leading to Yardsale’s opening, Ashbaugh would add some version of, “We were so lucky we could afford it.”
“We operate with profitability in mind. We have a lean team and the business just does really well,” she said. According to Chris Robinson, Yardsale’s head of operations, the opening day sales were four times what they’d forecasted. (Ashbaugh also said they had received rent abatements — free rent — from their landlord for the past year due to the many expensive structural improvements Yardsale was making to the building, a practice she said is “typical” in commercial real estate.)
Last year, Yardsale rebranded from a ski equipment company to a more generic “outdoor gear” purveyor. In their own words, even Ashbaugh and McGee aren’t the most dogged, “first chair last chair” skiers.
Besides, it’s not the actual skiing but the ski vibes that drive their brand. They sell products for active, happy, wealthy people with active, happy, wealthy friends. Could Cole Valley have used something less frivolous than a ski vibes coffee shop? Maybe, but Yardsale has apparently met the neighborhood right where it’s at and been greeted warmly. By any measure, a handsomely appointed meeting place for laptop workers and run clubs is more useful than a vacancy.
