During summers growing up in the small town of Three Rivers, Michigan, Jennifer Martin could usually be found riding her bike, roller skating and spending as much time in the water as possible. Then, at age 13, she dove into a friend’s pool and hit her head hard on the bottom, breaking her neck and injuring her cervical spinal cord. In a split second, she was paralyzed.

With a diagnosis of quadriplegia, Martin spent 10 days in the hospital, followed by three-and-a-half months at a rehabilitation facility in Grand Rapids. By the time she went home, she was in a wheelchair, able to use her arms to stand up and bear weight, but unable to walk. When she returned to school, she’d fallen far behind in class and had lost almost all of her friends. “The school was not set up well to accommodate a wheelchair, and the long days in the chair made me tired,” she says. Eventually, she dropped out.

At 17, Martin unexpectedly began to feel more sensation and movement in her arms and legs, and her doctor recommended that she go through a second round of rehab in Grand Rapids. That was a major turning point. “It made me physically stronger and gave me a much more independent mindset,” says Martin, now 39. “I still needed the wheelchair, but it helped me realize that I would be able to live away from home and wouldn’t need 24-hour care.”

She earned her GED and attended Davenport University in Kalamazoo, where she met her now-husband, Jon. They moved to Sarasota in 2013.

A few years later, on a visit to Michigan for a family wedding, Martin saw an ad on Facebook for the grand opening of a store in Kalamazoo called Bricks & Minifigs. She had no idea what it was, but her husband did: a LEGO resale store.

“He and his brother were LEGO fiends,” Martin says, “and they’d gotten me into it, too, so we went to the grand opening.”

The Martins learned that Bricks & Minifigs is a franchise with locations all over the country. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we opened one up in Sarasota?” she asked her husband. “We kept talking about it, and I was like, ‘Wait, are we having a serious conversation?’”

By the time their plane landed back in Sarasota, the Martins had a phone appointment with someone from the company. They opened their Bricks & Minifigs store at 4047 Clark Road in Sarasota in June 2022. Business has been good. They have five employees, and in addition to selling new and used LEGOs, the shop hosts birthday parties and special events. Martin manages the store in her wheelchair.

She credits her family and a handful of close friends with giving her the support she needed to get through. “When your world changes, you have to make a decision,” she says.  “If you’re up against something that sucks, like being in a wheelchair or not being able to walk, you have to ask yourself, ‘What’s the alternative?’ Are you going to sit there and not do anything? You could be in the ground, right?”