POULSBO — For Shorelines Gallery’s Marie and Mike Sipple a trip to Newport, Ore. didn’t lead to the Oregon coast, but rather the heart of Little Norway.

After visiting Shoreline’s Oregon location, Marie Sipple said she and her husband made the decision to leave corporate America and open a gallery in Poulsbo.

“I love this town, and I’m ecstatic to be here,” she said. “The people here are fantastic.”

Now instead of spending their days in the corporate trenches, the Sipples are surrounded by handcrafted jewelry, paintings, glass sculptures and metal artwork, all nestled in a cozy location on Front Street.

“I want people to feel relaxed when they come here, and the thing I like about the Shoreline concept is that it’s easy to visualize things,” Marie Sipple said.

With a combination of jewelry display cases interspersed with a variety of glasswork, carved wooden pieces and eye-catching steel panoramas, the store has something for everyone regardless of their budget, Mike Sipple said.

“Once we know what their budget is, we can work with them to find something in their price range,” he said.

Despite the store’s high-end appearance, Marie Sipple said items in the store range from as little as $5 to far greater than that.

“We have a lot of local art, some from Florida, Kansas and Michigan and the Northwest,” she said. “We have a good combination.”

As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, the Sipples are doing their best to make things easier for even the most inept male shopper to buy just the right gift.

“We’re helping girls make their wish lists, so the guys will know what they want when they come in,” Marie Sipple said.

Those lists are just one of the ways the duo is displaying their commitment to quality customer service, which makes shopping at the gallery an enjoyable experience.

The store is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the winter, but will stay open until 8 p.m. the Friday before Christmas for those last-minute shoppers, she said.

Despite not opening until late August, business at the gallery has exceeded expectations, she said.

“Ninety percent of our customers are from Poulsbo and the surrounding area,” she said.

Even though the couple lives in Gig Harbor, Mike Sipple said they are no strangers to Little Norway as he recalls driving to Poulsbo even when they lived on the east side of Seattle.

That familiarity played a role in the decision to open a business in Poulsbo, because of the amount of foot traffic they had seen in their visits, he said.

“Poulsbo had more foot traffic than Gig Harbor, so that’s why we opened here,” he said.