Claudia Mendiola-Durán remembers being one of five vendors who participated in a D.C. vinyl market last December. The energy in the room was palpable as frenzied holiday shoppers combed through piles of new and used record bins with a wide assortment of titles. But throughout the event, Mendiola-Durán noticed something was off.

“They wouldn’t even walk up to me,” she says of the shoppers. “They wouldn’t even give me a chance. I don’t see any difference [between the other vendors and me] except that I was a woman.”

Mendiola-Durán owns Sonidos! Music & More, a record store she opened in October in Beltsville, Md. She says the episode at the December vinyl market was hurtful—but not shocking: With over a decade of music-retail experience, the 35-year-old D.C.-area native was familiar with sexism in the record industry.

Sonidos! appears to be the only 100 percent woman-owned record store in the area, which would make it an emblem of change. (Reports on women-owned vinyl stores are limited, though a 2017 MixMag story noted that the number of such shops opening worldwide has swelled.) It’s also a chance for Mendiola-Durán finally to do things her way.

“I wanted to be in a position where I was lucrative enough to have good people work for me and give them responsibilities and give them the feeling of involvement—a feeling that they can help influence the course of the store,” she says.

Mendiola-Durán’s initiation into the music business happened in 2005, when she began working at Tower Records’ old Rockville, Md., store. (The global franchise had filed for bankruptcy the year before and, in 2006, it closed all its U.S. stores.) She then went to work at D.C.-area stalwarts Joe’s Record Paradise and Atomic Music before opening Sonidos! right next door to Atomic. She bought $1,200 worth of records and got her own store up and running using money she’d saved up from her previous two gigs as well as some financial support from her partner.

At that point, she says, “I had to open the store, because what am I going to do with all these records? It’s like committing yourself to something.”

As the new kid on the block, Sonidos! makes splashy attempts to stand out from its next door neighbor. A bright yellow logo—inspired by that of a now-defunct Mexican news magazine called ¡Alarma!—is plastered on its glass front doors. The interior of the store bears this lively hue as well. On the walls throughout are offbeat posters, including two large human anatomical charts—one of an ear drum, the other of a stomach—hanging near the register.

Mendiola-Durán also decorated the space with small homages to her Mexican and Guatemalan roots: A small Day of the Dead vase sits at the front of the store, for example. The shop’s very name is another nod to her background, meaning “sounds!” in Spanish. “I wanted to have that callback to some sort of reference of where my family comes from,” she says.

Sonidos! covers an expansive list of titles and mostly carries used records. “The one thing I really don’t mess with is classical,” Mendiola-Durán notes. But she does mess with practically everything else: jazz, R&B, rock, soul, country, soundtracks, new age, and what she calls “oddball stuff for sampling” for sound and music producers to use in their work. (She recently added volumes 1-3 of Authentic Sound Effects, full of sample sounds and effects.)

Mendiola-Durán typically spends Mondays and Tuesdays replenishing her store with new records—a task she says is easier than ever for her now that she manages a store where prospective sellers can meet her directly.

“A unique challenge about being a woman is safety,” says Mendiola-Durán. When she bought records for Sonidos!’s opening, she adds, “I would bring my partner or my associate with me to go look at stuff together. And that sucks, it hinders me because if they’re busy, I can’t go that day.”

Since opening the store, Mendiola-Durán says she’s gotten some promising leads on consistent sellers who can help keep her business growing. It’s one piece for ensuring the vitality of the store; the other, she says, is cultivating a sense of community within its luminous yellow walls.

That doesn’t always happen quickly or naturally. While Mendiola-Durán says so far she’s received a largely positive reception from local vinyl-heads, there have been one-off moments when she’s felt compelled to call out male customers for questioning her authority.

“I’ll have people come to my store, hold up a record, and go, ‘What do you know about this?,’” she says. “And I’ll say, ‘Well, I picked it out for my store.’ And then I’ve had people that have been really cool and be like, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve never seen a woman record store owner and I want to support what you’re doing’ so that balances out the bullshit, for a lack of a better word.”

Other challenges, like space, prevent Mendiola-Durán from doing the kind of community events she says she wants to do at Sonidos! But she’s aiming to make human connections in smaller ways, even if they aren’t boosting her bottom line.

“I just want people to be entertained or interested in something while at my spot,” she says. “Even if it’s just little music small talk, I want people to like the time they spend at my store, whether they walk out with something or not.”

Sonidos! Music & More is located at 11011-b Baltimore Ave., Beltsville, Md.. Open Wednesdays-Fridays noon-8 p.m., Saturdays noon-6 p.m., Sundays noon-5 p.m. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.