Email Sent: Oct 4, 2026

Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me: South Jersey Special, the gift shop on Station Ave in Haddon Heights.

As promised, every South Jersey Special email will contain a recipe. Why? Because South Jersey Special likes food more than email marketing. In fact, SJS likes almost everything more than email marketing.

Recipe

Barilla Traditional Lemon Pasta

You could put this sauce on your shoe, and your shoe would taste good.

Once you add pasta, you can throw pretty much anything into it—crab meat, broccoli, cauliflower, chicken, olives, peppers—and it's still good.

No basil? Skip it.

Don’t feel like following the steps? Throw everything into a big bowl with whatever else is around and BOOM: dinner.

You can even swap the delicious gluten pasta for gluten-free pasta, and the sauce will help you forget you’re eating gluten-free pasta.

Mavens

This week I was introduced to a world-changing marketing concept called Mavens.

A Maven is a person who knows a lot about a lot of things: products, places to shop, people who do things, places worth going.

And, importantly, they share what they know because they genuinely enjoy finding good things and helping other people find them too.

Can you imagine how pleasant the world could be if we all “mavened”?

We could eliminate: sponsored search results, social media ads, clickbait, spam calls, artificial scarcity, paid opinions, meaningless content BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Instead, “Hey. I found this great place. You should go.”

If every business had a couple of Mavens, our favorite places and services would have enough customers to be sustainable.

So we're going to add "mavening" along with recipes to every email.

Maving

Ren’s Coffeehouse & Books - South Jersey Special recently attended a Women’s Entrepreneur meeting on the second Monday of the month. The coffee was delicious, and the bookshop is as warm as Ren.

My Fair Trade Ladies - The two previous tenants of 531 Station Ave have moved on to new businesses. Find them here and here.

Shin Center of Integrative Sports Medicine - South Jersey Special was on the way to carpal tunnel, and Dr. Shin stopped it in its tracks. Expensive? Yes. Worth it if you’re in pain? Totally.

Gluten-free people, I’ve got a tip for you. Pop in to Arnie’s and walk to the back of the shop. Keep your eyes closed so you don’t see the stuff with gluten. On a silver rack in the back is a line of gluten-free pasta that’s the best we’ve discovered so far.

House Finch is a sincere, beautifully curated, nature-inspired gift shop at 740 Haddon Ave in Collingswood.

Happy Sunday. Go Birds. Enjoy the pasta, and see you on Station.

SJS