Feature
A Nice Touch
- heather anne lee
- Fred Lopez
Heidi Hardman has a philosophy for life that she credits, somewhat unexpectedly, to Patrick Swayze.
“You know the original Road House?” she asks, leaning forward with a wide smile. “He says if there’s trouble, you just be nice. And if that doesn’t work, then you get another person, and you both be nice.”
She pauses for a second and says, “It’s just not that hard… be nice.”
At 64, Heidi has become the kind of person who believes deeply in kindness, handwritten goals, rescue dogs, local nonprofits, and the idea that communities are built one relationship at a time. She believes in manifestation, too, though not the version involving expensive journals and curated morning routines. Hers is more practical than that
Every morning, she writes her goals on her shower wall. “Some are always the same,” she says. “Being a better person. Doing good. Helping where I can.”
And maybe that sounds simple until you realize she has built an entire life around those ideas.
Just Keep Swimming
For decades, Heidi reinvented herself over and over again: flight attendant, entrepreneur, retail owner, rescue advocate, mentor, community connector. Each chapter looks wildly different on paper, but the thread running through all of them is the same. Keep moving. Keep trying. Keep showing up for people.
Long before Winter Garden became home, Heidi was a girl growing up in Pittsburgh, living in the same house from the time she was 6 months old until she left at 20. After college, she took a job at an investment firm, despite knowing immediately that she was entirely unsuited for corporate life. Or finance, for that matter. Her real dream?
“All I wanted was to be a flight attendant,” she shares.
So she became relentless about it. Back then, getting hired meant mailing letters, making calls, and following up endlessly. Heidi did all of it. “I sent letters every single day,” she says. “Every day. I was determined.”
Eventually, the airline called. “They told me, ‘You were so persistent, we’re going to hire you anyway.’”
Persistence would become one of the defining characteristics of her life.
She met her husband, Ty, while they were both working in aviation — he a pilot, she a flight attendant — and together they eventually made their way to Florida. They settled first in Palm Harbor, where Heidi rode her bike through Ozona and spent weekends near the water. But even then, she was never someone who could limit herself to one thing at a time.
While working as a flight attendant, she started sewing children’s clothing by hand. Tiny outfits with music boxes sewn inside them that played nursery rhymes when pressed. She laughs now, remembering how ridiculous and wonderful it all was.
“I would literally sew on the airplane,” she says. “Then I started doing craft shows.”
One craft show turned into dozens. Soon she was flying across the country to work shows in Palm Springs on weekends, taking red-eyes home and heading straight back to work.
Looking back, even she sounds amazed by the stamina of her younger self. “It was crazy,” she says. “Thinking about it now, I’m like, why did I do that?”
The answer is woven through every part of her story: Heidi is someone who builds while moving. She always has been.
Over time, the craft shows evolved into storefronts. Storefronts evolved into multiple locations. There were years when business flourished and years when everything felt dangerously close to collapsing. “We almost went bankrupt two or three times,” she says plainly. “Like, really close.”
But whenever things shifted, she adapted. When one market stopped working, she learned another. When customers changed, she pivoted. She talks about those years without bitterness, almost with gratitude.
“That’s what all small businesses are about,” she says. “You see a need, or you see something interesting, and you pivot.”
Still, somewhere underneath all the motion and ambition, Heidi felt untethered. Successful, maybe. Busy, definitely. But not rooted.
Then came Winter Garden.
“I’ve reinvented myself so many times over the years,” she says. “Somewhere along the way, Winter Garden stopped being where I lived and became where I belonged.”
There’s No Place Like Home
When she opened her store in Winter Garden Village in 2007, Heidi was still splitting time between cities and businesses. Slowly, though, she began building something here that she hadn’t fully experienced anywhere else: community.
“I’ve reinvented myself so many times over the years,” she says. “Somewhere along the way, Winter Garden stopped being where I lived and became where I belonged.”
It’s not just the town itself she loves, though she lights up talking about the brick streets and familiar faces and the way people still stop to talk to one another. What matters most to her is the spirit underneath it.
“This downtown is the heart and the core of it,” she says. “You walk outside and you know people. You know their stories.”
Heidi has spent years becoming part of those stories herself.
Every Saturday morning, before most people have finished their first cup of coffee, Heidi is already making her rounds at the Winter Garden Farmers Market. One hand holds a leash. The other waves to familiar faces. Most likely, the dog at the end of that leash is Maverick, the local rescue who uses a wheelchair and has become something of a celebrity himself.
Silver-blonde hair catching the sun, Heidi rarely makes it more than a few feet without stopping. Someone wants to ask about business. Another person needs advice. A longtime customer stops to share family news. The conversations are rarely brief. They are the kind of exchanges that happen when years of showing up have turned acquaintances into neighbors and neighbors into friends.
That same instinct to show up follows her beyond the market. When discussions about downtown changes arise, Heidi can often be found standing at a City Commission meeting, speaking not only for herself but for fellow business owners who may not have the time, confidence, or platform to do so.
She is not the loudest voice in the room, nor the most political. Her concerns are usually practical: preserving the character of downtown, supporting independent businesses, making sure growth does not come at the expense of the people who built the community in the first place.
“I want to see us keep that small-town vibe. Things change, and that’s OK. We’ll pivot. We’ll adapt. But we have to remember what makes this place special,” she says simply.
Over the years, Heidi herself has become part of what makes Winter Garden so special. Not because she wanted recognition, but because helping people eventually became second nature.
The list of organizations she supports is long enough that she struggles to remember all of them. Rotary projects. School fundraisers. Animal rescues. Local nonprofits helping families through difficult circumstances. If a raffle basket needs filling, a silent auction needs a donation, or a charity event needs a sponsor, chances are Heidi has already answered the email.
She is the person introducing one business owner to another over coffee. The person who remembers whose daughter just graduated, whose mother is recovering from surgery, whose rescue dog finally found a forever home.
She keeps an unofficial map of Winter Garden in her head, not of streets and buildings, but of people and their stories.
That may be why she speaks so often about kindness. Not as an abstract virtue, but as a daily practice.
“Just be nice,” she says. “We all have things going on. We all have bad days. Don’t define somebody by one interaction.”
The philosophy sounds simple when she says it aloud: be nice, support local, respect people, help where you can. But it is grounded in decades of experience and perspective.
“When you’re younger, you’re in that constant rat race,” she says. “You have to do better, do more, compete more. Then later, you start opening your eyes to what other people are going through.”
Ironically, the thing that transformed Heidi most deeply was not business at all It was a rescue dog named Sparky.
“I want to see us keep that small-town vibe. Things change, and that’s OK. We’ll pivot. We’ll adapt. But we have to remember what makes this place special.”
Dog Days
Before Sparky, Heidi says she wasn’t particularly attached to dogs. “I didn’t dislike them,” she says. “I just didn’t really get it.”
Then she adopted an 8-month-old puppy with mange, scars around his neck, and boundless energy.
“That’s my dog,” she remembers thinking the moment she saw him.
Sparky changed her life in ways she still struggles to explain. “If there was ever a soulmate, he was.”
The rescue work that followed cracked something open in her emotionally. Years earlier, while participating in Toastmasters, Heidi had once been asked to give a speech about something she was passionate about. She couldn’t think of anything.
“That bothered me for years,” she says. “Then 20 years later, I found Sparky and thought, ‘Ohhhhh, now I get it.’”
Animal rescue changed her from the inside out. At one point, she spent upwards of 12 hours a day helping the animals — cleaning kennels, transporting dogs, handling adoptions, and sleeping at rescue facilities when necessary. She found herself drawn not to the easy cases, but to the difficult ones. “The internal injuries are far worse than the external,” she says quietly.
Today, Heidi speaks about rescue the same way she speaks about community: with tenderness, realism, and fierce commitment. She wants better protections for animals. More spay and neuter advocacy. More education. More compassion.
But she also understands that meaningful change rarely happens all at once. “You just do what you can,” she says. “You help where you can. You keep going.”
The same mindset shapes the culture around her businesses. Many of the people who work with Heidi have stayed for decades. Employees became extended family. Families became intertwined.
There is something strikingly unselfish about the way she talks about success now. She no longer sounds particularly interested in building bigger things. What matters to her is impact. “As long as you’re doing something good, something that helps the community or makes the world a little better, I’m all for it.”
And maybe that is why Winter Garden fits her so well. Because after decades of reinvention, surviving hardship, building businesses, rescuing animals, and planting roots in a town she now calls home, Heidi has arrived at a surprisingly uncomplicated conclusion about what matters most.
Know people. Help people. Love where you live. And whenever possible, be nice.
