The purpose of this paper is to describe an educational partnership experience between rural retailers and graduate students in a Merchandising, Apparel and Textiles program. Students were afforded an opportunity to work with small business owners in rural communities, giving them real world exposure to the actual challenges being faced by today's rural retailers. This collaborative effort provided the rural retailers with ideas to improve their businesses, while giving the students interactive experiences in the workplace.The usefulness of this type of partnership is described.