April Lawyer is a professional athlete and founder of Vanilla boutique, celebrating 20 years in Bend.

Recipe for Success

Start with an industrious child growing up in the sports-centric culture of Big Bear Lake, California, during the ‘80s. Fold in raw athletic talent, tenacity and grit. Add hefty doses of style and community support. That only begins to describe April Lawyer: professional athlete—the first woman to compete in both downhill mountain biking and snowboarding in the first X Games of 1997, and founder of the Old Mill District boutique Vanilla, celebrating its  20th anniversary in 2025. Lawyer was one of the first retailers in the Old Mill District when it was a sparkle in Bill Smith’s eye. Similarly, Lawyer saw a new niche for her shop with its melding of the snowboard and fashion worlds. She recently talked with Adam Short of Bend Magazine’s The Circling Podcast.

A lemonade stand and a bedroom window candy drive-through were a start for the young entrepreneur:

We lived in an old house and I was on the lower floor, so I had a little pop-out window. I got some milk crates and lined them up so kids could step up to the window. I made a little sign, and I created a little store out of my bedroom window. Kids would knock on the window, I’d slide it open and they would ask, “What do you have today?”

I don’t know that my dad completely loved having kids constantly knocking on the windows, but it was really fun, and it created such a great opportunity to understand how to put my profits [from selling candy] into overhead. It was my first introduction into how retail works, but also to customer service and talking to people and just sort of figuring out what people want.

It was an important step to advocate for herself, and being authentic was the best form of marketing:

At one point in time I did bring on a manager [as a professional athlete], but I felt like just being my own authentic self was my best marketing. Having somebody on the outside trying to do that just didn’t sit well with me. I really learned a lot about marketing because I negotiated all my own contracts, and I think that to this day it was the best education I could have given myself—to be an advocate for myself.

Vanilla began as the “vanilla shell” of a space and an idea to blend the cultures of a snowboard shop with a boutique:

In 2005, you were either a snowboard shop or you were a boutique; there wasn’t any in between. And I thought, why can’t we just put the two worlds that I’ve now been exposed to and really love together? Nowadays, there are lots of those, but back then, there really wasn’t a whole lot of that. There was one space that was available in a brand new building that hadn’t been built out yet. It was what they called a “vanilla shell.” It was this huge 2,500-square-foot space, but it was beautiful. I guess I must’ve been crazy.

Bill Smith believed in her ideas—and the osprey out his window—in the rising Old Mill District of 20 years ago:

I didn’t know who Bill Smith was, and I didn’t know what I was walking into. Bill was just sitting there in his Old Mill office smiling at me. And I thought, “Okay, I have to make a pitch. This is the real deal.” I didn’t have a business plan. I just had to pitch [him and his team] on an idea.

Bill looked at me silently, and he had this funny look on his face and I thought, ”Oh, this isn’t going to go well.” He didn’t say anything. He just let me keep talking and talking. Then, finally, he looks at his window and he says, “Look out there. Do you like my osprey? Isn’t that beautiful?” He was so proud. He looked at me, smiled and said,  “I like you, let’s do this.”

Vanilla was embraced by the community early on and it’s an honor to share a vision:

I am so fortunate that the community embraced what we were doing early on, and I think they saw its value. My goal with Vanilla from the beginning was for people to enjoy it because of what we had curated, but also the authenticity of what we were all about. I wanted people to enjoy what I created, and not because it was attached to whatever [sports-related] notoriety I had at that time. But I think to be able to tap into a little bit of who you are is very unique, and I’m very honored to be able to do this.

Learn more about April Lawyer’s world of professional athletics and entrepreneurship. Listen to Bend Magazine’s The Circling Podcast.