The day before Four Winds Music & Arts Festival opened its doors, Stefan Bernardino and Michelle Tarian were sitting inside ICON Event Hall talking about squirrels.
Not metaphorical squirrels. An actual backyard squirrel operation that had apparently escalated to the point of planting its own corn.
“I have more issues with the squirrels at my house than I do with any of the owners of these venues,” Bernardino said while talking about the relationships Sanctuary Goods has built around Sioux Falls’ music scene.
Tarian immediately identified the enemy.
“The squirrel cartel.”
It was funny, but the conversation around it said quite a bit about Sanctuary Goods.
Spend enough time talking with Bernardino and Tarian and the lines between business, art, friendship, music and community start disappearing. A question about vending turns into a story about discovering metal bands. A discussion about jewelry becomes a story about family. Ask about their store and eventually they are talking about the people who come through the door just because they need someone to listen.
And when Four Winds needed somebody to build the vendor side of a festival sprawling across downtown Sioux Falls, putting more than 100 bands alongside dozens of artists, makers and businesses, Sanctuary Goods suddenly found itself doing on a much larger scale what it had already been doing one table, one conversation and one local show at a time.
They were building the room around the music.
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Built out of conversations
Sanctuary Goods did not begin with some carefully engineered business plan.
It began with bartending, a shower and a phone call.
“A whole bunch of bartending,” Bernardino said, laughing.
In October 2024, his friend James Landon called about space becoming available inside the Jones421 Marketplace in downtown Sioux Falls. The lease could be short. Bernardino called Tarian.
“What do you think? Should we try it out?”
They started hunting through Marketplace, making phone calls and piecing together what would become Sanctuary Goods.
Bernardino had returned to Sioux Falls after years in Colorado, where he worked in the hemp industry and ran an apothecary. He brought that experience home with him, from product sourcing to understanding holistic wellness products and the people looking for them.
“I learned my lessons in Colorado,” he said. “And all those lessons I learned, I brought back here.”
Tarian brought something less visible on a store shelf but just as important to what Sanctuary Goods became: relationships.
She and Bernardino were both raised in Sioux Falls and had known each other for roughly 24 years. Between the two of them, there always seemed to be another artist, friend, maker or family connection waiting to be rediscovered.
“If she doesn’t know somebody, I do,” Bernardino said. “If I don’t know somebody, she does.”
Those connections began populating the store.
Among them was local artist Kevin Taylor, a longtime family friend of Tarian’s who creates etched mirrors, custom framing and calligraphy. Tarian had known him since childhood, when he worked at her uncle’s downtown restaurant, Touch of Europe. Decades later, his artwork was hanging inside Sanctuary Goods.
The store became difficult to categorize because Bernardino and Tarian never seemed particularly interested in forcing everything into one category.
There is jewelry and leatherwork. Crystals and tinctures. Artwork. Wellness products. Curiosities. Handmade pieces. Goods connected to their families and heritage, including pieces sourced from Oaxaca, Mexico as well as Armenia, Russia and Estonia.
Some products disappear almost as quickly as they arrive.
There is a wonderfully simple test for whether something belongs.
“If I don’t want to sell it, then it’s usually a good thing to have,” Bernardino said.
There are pieces they secretly hope nobody buys. Things they want to wear themselves, open themselves or simply keep around because they like looking at them.
That personal attachment keeps Sanctuary Goods from feeling like inventory arranged according to a purchasing algorithm. The store changes because their interests change. Workshops move from leatherwork to jewelry to nutrition to candle-making depending on the season. Bernardino works with silver clay and shells. Tarian has been preparing to return to making candles. Both keep finding new things they want to learn with their hands.
But the name tells you more about the place than the merchandise does.
It took road trips to the Black Hills and Minneapolis before they found it. Bernardino’s mother eventually suggested “Sanctuary.” Bernardino added “Goods.”
The word sanctuary stuck because people were already treating the place like one.
“We have a lot of people that come in just to have a conversation with us,” Bernardino said. “And we’ll spend an hour talking to them.”
Tarian put it even more simply.
“We love love. We love people.”
They want somebody walking through the door to feel seen even if that person never buys anything.
“Even if you don’t look at any of our products and you just need a listening ear,” Bernardino said, “we’re usually there.”
That approach follows them when they leave the store.
A table beside the stage
Sanctuary Goods has become increasingly familiar outside its Jones421 walls because Bernardino and Tarian keep turning up where Sioux Falls gathers.
Especially where Sioux Falls gets loud.
They have worked vendor shows at Bigs Bar and other community events while becoming regular faces around local music. They have popped up alongside live music at ICON Event Hall. Some nights the table carries jewelry, stones, wellness products, art and handmade goods. Other nights the most valuable thing happening around it may simply be another conversation.
Vendors can change the geography of a concert.
A room with nothing but a stage and a bar moves in two directions: toward the band or toward the drink. Put artists, makers and local businesses into the same space and suddenly people have somewhere else to drift between sets. They stop. They look at something. Somebody explains how it was made. A stranger joins the conversation.
The night opens sideways.
Sanctuary Goods understands that partly because Bernardino and Tarian have spent so much time standing on the other side of the table themselves.
And those shows have changed them too.
“Just from April to today we’ve probably seen easily over 200 artists just because we’ve been vending,” Tarian said during the August interview.
They were hearing genres and discovering musicians they might never have encountered otherwise.
Metal, in particular, surprised them.
“The metal kids are, you would think the metal kids would be the bad boys, but no, they’re the kindest, sweetest little kids,” Bernardino said.
“We like metal music now,” Tarian added.
That might be the best advertisement possible for keeping vendors in music spaces.
Sanctuary Goods did not enter those rooms pretending to understand every corner of the scene. They entered, listened and stayed long enough for the scene to introduce itself.
Hundreds of performances later, the people behind the booth were becoming music fans too.
They also saw something from the road that concert audiences rarely think about. A healthy local music culture needs more than bands.
It needs venues willing to open their rooms. Promoters willing to take chances. Photographers, journalists and production crews. Artists selling something they made at home. Food trucks outside. Small businesses putting tables against walls. Fans willing to show up early enough to see the opener.
None of those pieces look particularly enormous by themselves.
Together, they are the scene.
The other side of the booth
There is another reason Sanctuary Goods’ presence at local events feels different: Bernardino and Tarian know what it feels like to make something and then put a price tag beside it.
Selling somebody else’s artwork, Bernardino said, can actually be easier.
When it belongs to somebody else, admiration comes naturally. You can explain why it is beautiful. You can tell somebody what went into it.
Selling your own work means listening to the small voice asking whether anybody will actually pay what you believe it is worth.
“It’s easier to sell somebody else’s work than your own,” Bernardino said. “Because when you make it yourself, you’re always nervous.”
For him, vending helped turn that uncomfortable calculation into something more personal.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is finding my worth.”
That understanding matters when Sanctuary Goods turns around and creates room for other artists.
Inside the store, makers can put work in front of people who otherwise may never encounter it. At events, artists can step out from behind a social media account and talk directly with the person holding something they made.
Sometimes those relationships have decades behind them, as with Taylor and his etched mirrors.
Other times they begin across a vendor table.
Bernardino and Tarian have spent enough hours working events to understand both sides. They know the vulnerability involved in laying your work on a table and hoping somebody stops. They know what a good event can do for a maker who needs people to discover them.
They also know how much easier the whole thing becomes once “networking” stops feeling like a business term and starts feeling like friendship.
“We know most people by first name,” Bernardino said while talking about the vendors preparing for Four Winds.
That is a small sentence.
For a local arts scene, it is a fairly important one.
Building a village at Four Winds
The scale changed when Four Winds came calling.
Festival organizers Corey Church and Taylor approached Bernardino and Tarian about taking charge of a vendor village for the 2026 Four Winds Music & Arts Festival.
By the afternoon before the festival, more than 35 vendors were expected alongside more than 100 bands spread through the weekend.
That is no longer setting up a table.
It is organizing a small neighborhood.
Sitting inside ICON while the festival was beginning to take shape around them, Bernardino and Tarian seemed almost amused by how naturally they had arrived there.
“Here we are here now,” Bernardino said.
“We’re sitting inside Icon Event Hall,” Tarian replied.
There would be local vendors, artists and food trucks. Some of the artists whose work Sanctuary Goods already carried inside its store would have booths of their own, giving them space to present their work directly instead of letting the shop speak on their behalf.
For Tarian, that was part of the excitement.
“It’ll be special to see them doing their own, you know, presentation of their work in their own way.”
They called it a vendor village, and the word fit.
A marketplace can be transactional. A village has people in it.
Four Winds has always carried “arts” in its name, but a festival with more than 100 bands can easily let everything beyond the stages disappear into the volume. The vendor village gave the other half of that identity somewhere physical to live.
The musicians brought records, riffs and songs.
A few feet away, somebody else brought a mirror they etched, a piece of jewelry they shaped, clothing they designed or an object nobody knew they wanted until they picked it up.
Sanctuary Goods’ role was to help those worlds share the same weekend.
For Bernardino and Tarian, the assignment also represented a quiet evolution.
They had started as vendors.
Then they became store owners carrying the work of other artists.
Then they became familiar faces at shows.
Now they were helping decide who else got a table.
Their own experiences gave them an unusual perspective on the responsibility. They knew what it felt like to wonder whether a booth would be worth the time. They knew how much a good crowd could mean to somebody selling handmade work and how quickly a bad experience could sour an artist on returning.
By the time Four Winds arrived, their job was no longer simply to participate in the local creative community.
They were helping create opportunities inside it.
Afterglow
The squirrel cartel never really left the conversation.
It was one of those strange little detours that happens when an interview stops feeling like an interview for a minute. Somehow we had traveled from holistic health to etched mirrors, metal shows, Oaxaca, candle making, Four Winds and finally agricultural rodents running an unauthorized corn operation.
That wandering quality feels appropriate for Sanctuary Goods.
The shop itself invites wandering. So does their table at a concert. Pick something up. Ask where it came from. Discover who made it. Hear somebody’s story. Maybe leave with jewelry. Maybe leave having discovered a local artist. Maybe you only talked for 20 minutes.
The transaction is almost secondary.
Sioux Falls’ music community needs bands worth hearing, certainly. It needs stages and sound systems and people willing to book the next show.
It also needs people willing to occupy all the spaces between those things.
That is where Sanctuary Goods keeps turning up.
Beside the stage. Behind the table. Inside the shop. Among the artists. At the vendor village. Somewhere in the crowd hearing a band they had never listened to before and discovering, apparently, that the metal kids are actually pretty sweet.
A sanctuary does not have to be quiet.
Sometimes it has a guitar roaring through the wall.
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