By: Madison Fortney
Ziaya’s is a metaphysical shop located on Visalia’s popular Main Street. The shop was founded in 2001 by Eva Cantu. Four years ago, Eva Cantu passed down the shop to her daughter Ziah Cantu.
Now, the shop is a family and woman-owned business that offers many healing tools to the public. The owner of Ziaya’s, Ziah Cantu says, “Our shop is all things holistic and self healing.”
Cantu wanted to focus on providing spiritual services to her customers. She gives her customers tools that will assist them in bettering themselves through self-care and personal healing. The shop offers a variety of remedies such as meditation, crystals, jewelry, books, incense, and other holistic items.
Ziaya’s attracts many customers because of their unique selection and art work on the side of their shop. Many visitors love snapping a quick picture in front of their beautiful, hand-painted butterfly wings. The wings were painted by Cantu’s cousin, Mikayla Gutierrez. Gutierrez is a very talented local artist, she also painted the Ziaya’s logo.
Ziaya’s unique selection that can be purchased in their shop gets imported from places all over the world. Cantu says, “We import our inventory from Nepal, India, Korea, and we also have whole sellers that frequently visit our shop.”
Cantu attended Fullerton College to further her academic studies. While attending Fullerton, Cantu came up with the idea of adding a yoga studio to her very own shop. Cantu says, “Down South every street corner had a yoga shop, yoga and meditation was extremely common in Fullerton.” When Cantu came back to the Central Valley she quickly noticed the lack of yoga and meditation studios in Visalia. Cantu wanted to provide a yoga studio to her customers in order to help them find peace through forms of meditation.
During the pandemic, Ziaya’s had to close down their shop to their customers. Cantu decided to still offer the option to purchase items online with curbside pickup. Cantu says, “The pandemic really helped Ziaya’s reach a bigger variety of customers because a lot of people found out about our shop while being quarantined because we had a lot of remedies for healing and self-care.”
Ziaya’s attracts many customers due to their widespread social media accounts and significant number of followers. Cantu frequently updates her followers on their Instagram account, @ziayas about new inventory and other important information. Cantu says, “I post consistently and a lot of our followers give our shop shout-outs.”
There is only one shop location which is located in our own very own town of Visalia. Cantu says, “We plan on eventually expanding our business to more locations and towns.” The shop’s address is 801 E Main St, Visalia, CA 93292, it’s open Monday-Sunday 11AM-5PM.
Madison Fortney
Madison 23' is a second year journalist with a strong passion for writing. Outside of journalism she's involved in soccer and track. Her main focus is Clubs and Lifestyles but she enjoys working on all news stories.
Tags: clubs & lifestyles, madison fortney, redwood gigantea, redwood high school, redwood journalism, redwood rangers, shoplocal, ziaya's
