The group behind Thnk Collective in front of the remodeled former Grove Avenue Pharmacy building. (Jonathan Spiers photos)
A longtime pharmacy building in Richmond’s West End is being reborn as a new hub of well-being.
Thnk Collective has opened at 4911 Grove Ave., which for decades was the home of Grove Avenue Pharmacy before the drugstore closed five years ago.
Where the pharmacy dispensed medicines and other remedies, Thnk Collective aims to promote personal health through a concoction of self-help services, AI technology and a curated collection of retail products.
Behind Thnk (“Think” stylized with the dot of the “i” above the “n”) are local adman Cabell Harris and business partner Richard Boehling, founder and chairman of Productiv, a locally based supply chain management service firm.
Harris developed the Thnk brand over the past two years through his Work Labs ad agency, which also is now based in the building, and was connected by a mutual friend with Boehling, who enlisted Harris on internal communications and strategy work for Productiv.
“We were talking about performance; everything that he does is about efficiencies and how do you get the most out of what you have,” Harris said of Boehling, whose business deals with logistics, packaging and fulfillment services.
Rich Boehling, right, watches as Thnk business partner Cabell Harris pulls a Work Labs-branded beer in the space pre-opening.
“We started thinking about what makes people perform well. At the same time, I had come up with this Thnk brand,” Harris said. “We started thinking about the Thnk brand and how we could broaden that out: How could everybody and anybody make their world a little bit better?”
The former Benedictine schoolmates, who overlapped there but never met, did some research and came up with what they call the eight dimensions of well-being that are Thnk’s focus, ranging from physical, emotional and spiritual to financial, intellectual, environmental, social.
“We were still working on the Productiv project at the time,” Boehling recalled. “Whenever you’re an employer going to employees, you need to have a structure, it needs to make sense, so we were looking for the right model to launch the campaign with, and that’s when we found these eight dimensions of wellness and said, ‘Gosh, this is a foundation for living a better life.’”
They formed Thnk Collective with Patti Harris, Cabell’s wife, who is a partner in and curates the retail store. The store consists of various home goods, art and personal care items that she said range in price from $20 to $1,000. The store expands the inventory of Thnk’s online store, which the Harrises said was limited without a brick-and-mortar retail location.
The 2,000-square-foot space doubles as a retail store and office for Harris’s Work Labs agency.
“One of the reasons for having a store was to be able to have more offerings for products,” Cabell said.
“And connection to community,” Patti added, noting they also plan to use the space for community gatherings and events.
“This neighborhood, it’s spot-on for what we’re trying to do,” she said. “We’re really creating a different vibe here with a lot of different products that hopefully you don’t see anywhere else.”
The group is leasing the 2,000-square-foot building from owners David and Jenny Maraghy, who in 2020 bought the property that’s across the parking lot from the Compass real estate office that Jenny runs through her Jenny Maraghy Team.
Cabell Harris said they signed a three-year lease for the space, which they’ve been remodeling using local vendors such as Katrin Onder, who designed the window display. The space also displays lights from John Scarpati’s Old Hollywood Light Co.
Harris declined to say how much money they’ve put into upfitting the space, which the Maraghys had previously renovated. Work Labs’ Audrey Meñez was the project manager for the Thnk space, and Susan Jamieson handled the interior design. Kevin Daley was the contractor, and James Schmidt was a subcontractor.
Pictured from left: Audrey Meñez, Rich Boehling, Kevin Daley, Cabell Harris, Patti Harris and Jacob Morris. (Photo courtesy Thnk)
Also involved in the collective is Jacob Morris, a project manager at Productiv, who is developing a Thnk-specific AI platform called Bubble that Boehling said will enhance the Thnk experience, from recommending wine pairings for customers to pinpointing inventory in the retail supply chain.
Thnk also has a website with blog posts and other content and offers paid memberships that come with product discounts and other perks. Thnk memberships range from free to $88 or $195 a year.
With the storefront, which had a soft opening Thursday, Patti said that having a physical presence will help take the two-year-old brand and collective to the next level.
“This is a good vehicle for messaging for what we stand for, and everything else is going to evolve from that. We need buy-in – buy-in to this location, to the philosophy, to the meaning and the feeling you’re going to get when you come in,” she said. “Having a headquarters is making a lot more things possible for us.”