From goat cheese to fresh eggs and supplements to bath and body products, customers stopping by Dayspring Nature Shop on Opelika Road are sure to find a large offering of goods sourced from local growers and makers.
Brother and sister Sebastien and Valerie Wersinger are co-owners of the store, having inherited it from their mother, Yolande Wersinger, who passed away in March.
Sebastien Wersinger, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, is the most involved in managing the business along with the store manager, Brad Butcher, who runs the shop on a day-to-day basis.
Dayspring was originally founded in the early 1970s. In 2000, Yolande Wersinger bought the business after having managed the store for a few years. Sebastien Wersinger said his mother had always been interested in more natural and healthy ways of living or treating illnesses, ever since he and his sister were little.
“That’s something that ever since I’ve known my mom was one of her big interests,” he said. “She had that already in her, so it was a natural step for her to come into Dayspring. And then once she started managing it, she realized that this is what she wanted to do, she wanted to have her own store.”
When his mother passed away, Sebastien Wersinger began operating Dayspring from his home in Utah, which he says is “a bit of a challenge.”
“To run it as it had been, it’s OK, because like I said our manager, Brad, he’s been doing this for so long that he knows how to keep things going," Sebastien Wesinger said. "He’s familiar with our local farmers and vendors, and he’s very knowledgeable in terms of the products we have in the store.”
Sebastien Wersinger said implementing changes is not always easy.
“We’ve been trying to get some new products in and do a little bit of social media advertising, and so, in that sense, it’s a little difficult to try to implement new things from a distance,” he said.
Dayspring sources many of their products locally.
“Mostly, I still like to consider that we’re locally owned,” Sebastien Wersinger said, laughing a little. “And so yeah, we want to support other small businesses and local businesses and farmers.”
Some of the local goods that Dayspring sells include cheese, yogurt, eggs, goat
“A lot of people love coming in to get things that you really can’t get anywhere else in our bulk foods, bulk herbs, spices section,” Sebastien Wersinger said.
Sebastien Wersinger was interested in small business before he inherited the store from his mother.
“My mom, she was a big proponent of that, and she would talk to us about it all the time,” he said. “That’s something that I’m familiar with and that’s something that, especially when I saw the quality of the products that I was finding from local farmers, … I was really impressed with what people were doing there locally, so that’s something that we definitely want to promote and get the word out on.”
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