La Bodega expands its good taste in Anchorage by sdmn
Anchorage has possibly the most universal fine beverage store on the planet. It’s La Bodega Store, a place where you can find a wide variety of high-quality wines, beers, and spirits of no lesser alcohol content from all over the world. Pamela Hatzis is its founder.
Born in Germany and raised in Arizona, Pamela Hatzis proves to be an entrepreneurial and restless spirit. In 1996 she came to Alaska, where she currently resides with her family. Her experience and her studies in Business, Finance and Marketing, focused on small businesses, prompted her to look for, and start her own business in this state, and more specifically in Anchorage.
Thus, barely two years ago La Bodega Store was born, a place that we can qualify as “universal,” if we take into account the wide variety of wines, beers and spirits of high quality and no less alcohol content, from all over the world, that Pamela has for sale.
La Bodega’s flagship store is located at 530 E. Benson Boulevard in the Metro Mall. But at six-month intervals each, two more stores were opened under same name in Anchorage. One is in Downtown, 718 K Street, the other in Girdwood, at 194 Olimpic Mountain Loop.
“The first store already existed as a local store, and I decided that it could be a safe business for me. I was looking for a stable, year-round business; not a seasonal, tourist-focused business, or dependent on a season or a few dates on the calendar. I sell wines of all kinds, American and European; beers of all kinds, also from America and Europe, mainly French cider, Belgian beer, American and Scotch whisky, and the Japanese liquor par excellence, sake, of great popular roots in Japan, which has a cultural and symbolic meaning and an ancestral brewing process,” Pamela Hatzis tells Sol de Medianoche.
“I also sell chocolate, coffee, snacks, and other national and international ‘delicatessen,’ such as honey from some African countries. Wine and beer are the best-selling products throughout the year. But sake is also very popular,” she adds.
But Pamela is not stopping there. She is already thinking about selling “art and books, because the beverages I sell at La Bodega are part of the culture of the people and nations they come from, and art and books are the best complement to accompany a tasting of all these products.”
Speaking of tasting, are your products consumed in your stores? “Not yet” Pamela answers,” but I already have in mind to start offering tastings and consumption in the stores. It’s a project I have for the fall of 2024, if the economic conditions allow me to do so.” Pamela likes the contact with people and the personalized treatment and service. She has regular customers and most of those who enter one of her stores for the first time repeat the experience. There must be a reason for this. “They are customers from all communities and ethnicities, but mainly local customers and, to a lesser extent, tourists.”
