On a quiet Soho side street, this mom-and-pop pharmacy has been serving as a local hangout and a boutique for French skincare products since 1994 — but almost didn’t make it through the pandemic.
Despite over the years surviving a catastrophic fire, the birth of online shopping and the neighborhood’s transformation from an industrial wasteland into a pricey playground for the wealthy, COVID nearly killed Thompson Chemists — until the owners started posting on their TikTok account, which now boasts an enthusiastic following.
“We’ve had an over-200% business increase thanks to socials,” estimated Jolie “Mama J” Alony, who speaks five languages, hails from both the south of France and the Upper East Side, and runs the bright green Thompson Street outpost with her husband of 32 years, “Medicine Man” Gary.
“We were just hanging on by the bare minimum — there’s no customers, no nothing,” Jolie said of the pandemic’s darkest days when, with extra time on their hands, she and Gary began more actively maintaining their website — and posting on Facebook, Instagram and, with their youngest daughter’s encouragement, TikTok.
“All of a sudden, I don’t know how or why, we went viral. And then we just kept going viral, and people kept coming in and saying ‘I saw you on Tiktok’ and they want to meet me.”
Jolie was a natural for the platform, where her entertaining extroversion and generous antics — like randomly giving away test samples to “winners” while banging on a cymbal-cowbell-log instrument that a patron once gifted her — immediately translated into tens of thousands of views and raised awareness for Thompson Chemists’ indie existence, not to mention its inventory of hard-to-find, cult-favorite French imports.
