This is a story I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell.
Now’s the right time. Why? Because somebody asked me and caught me at a moment when I’m ready to get a little more real around here. We’ll call this somebody Nick {not his real name}. Nick’s an indie retailer with a brick and mortar store. He wrote this in the fill-in section of the survey I’m running right now: “Just tell me why THE BLISSFUL wasn’t your cup of tea anymore. Will I get burned out just at the time when I should be hitting my stride and making money??? I am too nosy to ask??? This is just something that has always stumped me as I have followed you from the start. My store is only 6 months old and it worries me that I will put all this effort in and not be here for the long haul. Thanks.”
Now that’s a blog post-worthy question.
Photo by Peter_Rivera courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons
As some of you know, in February 2010, I closed my funky French-inspired lifestyle boutique, THE BLISSFUL, which was located here in my hometown of Canton, Ohio. We were lucky enough to have some national press over our four years and grew a blog readership and a customer base for our Online Boutique, through which we sold internationally {mostly nationally, though, as those international shipments were a chore to prepare!}.
The short answer as to why I closed: I was burnt out. And I needed a change with every fiber of my being. And I was ready to take a chance on my lifelong dream of being paid to write from home {and cafés}.
I surprised people by closing the store when I did, as for all intents and purposes, my shop was on the up and up. Who closes a business — closes, not sells — on an upswing? I do want to talk about that, mostly because I want to lend courage to other entrepreneurs who need it to make a tough decision.
Lenses I Was Looking At My Shop Through Around the Time I Decided To Close It {Total Honesty Here}
My Short Term Goals
No. 1 I always knew my shop would be around for a duration of 5 years. No more. In the beginning, I thought of it as a lifestyle experiment: I wanted to see if I could build a concept into a living, breathing business that would be meaningful to other people. {Note: while this sounds heady and esoteric and maybe kinda cool, this is not a good reason to start a business.} I knew I’d close the shop after five years unless it was such an earth-shattering financial success that it would be stupid to close it — as in, if at the five year mark I were rolling in six figures take home pay, taking two vacations a year, and had a staff to work the sales floor 90% of the time so that I could focus only {only!} on the buying, the marketing, the blogging, the photography, and be the face of the PR but not spend much time working in the store during shop hours. This was my ideal role as I envisioned it. Not for every shop owner, but it was for me. When I closed the shop, we’d just completed our 4th year and I was nowhere near this goal. I was still on the sales floor 90% of the time, plus doing the buying, the marketing, the blogging, the photography, and being the face of the PR. I took one short vacation a year {a gift from my boyfriend’s parents} — tethered to my cell phone during shop hours — and didn’t take an income from the business above and beyond simply funding basic existence: car, auto insurance, health insurance, prescriptions, basic self care. Starbucks was an indulgence I really couldn’t afford. I had staff to pay. Staff I desperately needed. And there was always another retail season to buy for, another event to buy food and beverage for, another ad to pay for.
No. 2 I wanted to get myself back. Entrepreneurship can be all-consuming, and a business with an open-to-the-public storefront where just anyone can walk through the door and demand your attention even more so. A high overhead business model like independent retail, even more so. A retail concept that appeals to customers who want a “luxury shopping experience” even more so. In four years, I’d gained a considerable amount of weight, could count on two hands the number of articles of clothing I’d purchased for myself {always and only out of necessity, as in, my jeans tore}, and hadn’t enjoyed a full holiday celebration with my family more than once. I would also say I short circuited a few friendships, only stayed awake past 9:30 PM on Friday and Saturday nights under great duress, and had all but lost my short term memory. No, really. Ask my Shopgirls. What were their names again? {So kidding. Couldn’t have done it without you J, Z, L, A, and K.}
No. 3 The writing thing. Yeah, I couldn’t shake it. I wanted it. I wanted it so much more than I wanted my shop that the comparison was laughable. I missed having the stretches of time writers need to get stuff done, what’s referred to as butt-in-the-chair-time. About two years into my life as shopkeeper, I had a moment when I was really feeling my mortality. I asked myself, “When it’s time for me to leave this earth, what one thing will be really, really hard to accept not having done?” My answer was immediate and LOUD. Write a book. Claim ‘writer’ as my occupation. Get published beyond my own blog. This being an ‘impossibility’ wasn’t even on my radar. Just going for it with my whole heart would be enough. But with a behemoth of a business already on my hands, I knew it would remain a virtual impossibility {unless I forsook, you know, sleeping and eating}. And the idea of closing my store to pursue my writing wasn’t the least bit torturous. It sounded like such a relief, such a blessing.
My Long Term Realities
No. 1 The cash flow realities of a high overhead business model like specialty retail are not to be understated. Smart, comprehensive money talk around the indie retail scene is the hardest thing to come by. No one wants to divulge how their financials really shake out. So the education itself is nearly impossible to track down, and “traditional” methods of funding and budgeting for a generic small business don’t always work so well for retail. {You may not agree, but there we are.} I had no. flipping. clue. what it took to make the money work for a small shop when I got into the biz. Fortunately, I had someone on my team who had a clue, but for the most part we were operating on instinct and common sense: We made this much this week, so we can reinvest about this much. Figure we need this much for this three-inch stack of bills by the 21st. It was a highly uncomfortable way to operate, but I did the best I could. Eventually I got some experienced counsel in the realm of small shop financials and was happy to find out that what I’d been doing by instinct was pretty much “the way” of indie retail. And that the rest of making money depended on your merchandise mix, your market, the economic climate, and a bevy of other intangible factors. But that still didn’t get me out of the chokehold. You heard it here: making money in indie retail — real, you can-live-and-retire-fairly-comfortably-on-this-money — is hard. It sure as heck doesn’t happen by accident. The ones who make it look easy have deep pockets, private investors, or have been at the game a long time and know exactly how to play the cards, often sacrificing “vision” for what’s most profitable, or have lived and breathed retail their whole life and just get it from the inside out. I won’t pretend that money stress wasn’t a big factor in me wanting to jump out of retail and jump into something that just made more sense. {No pun intended.} My store’s sales per square foot were in the “you’re doing fine — actually pretty good!” range {one of the many “guideposts” by which people judge the financial health of a store}, but I found myself reinvesting at an alarming rate as our popularity grew, and paying good staff was a considerable part of it, too. I never built in a livable wage for myself, and the longer you go without doing that, the harder it becomes to add your own interests back into the equation.
No. 2 “Where is this all leading me?” I’m in my early thirties. Someday my {also entrepreneurial} guy and I will get married and start a family. We’d like to have four kids {seriously — but we’ll see what happens with that}. I’ve always thought I’d be a stay-at-home mom and make my living writing from home. Raising kids and transitioning to a new career can’t be easy. So I thought, why not get the writing-from-home part comfortably in place long before the kidlets are a reality? I never intended to lope into my shop with a baby carrier on my arm, much less ring up customers at the cash wrap while my baby cries in her Pack n’ Play in the back office. Not the life I want. I know not everyone has a skill set {like writing and coaching} that can lead to working from home, so I’m not judging here or suggesting that what feels right for me is the ideal way. But I’m clear on what I want and I’m not going to deny myself a chance to go for it.
No. 3 The “5 years and that’s it” reality. I was ready to get out after 4 years. I knew I’d be out in a year anyway. Why toil through that fifth year when the end result would be the same? The shop was going to close anyway. {The intended short-term lifecycle of THE BLISSFUL was never divulged to customers.}
My Inborn Personal Preferences
No. 1 This is a difficult point to admit because some of my former customers read this site, but if I’m going to be honest here and encourage you to be honest about your entrepreneurial desires, I have to go for it. Frontwomaning a store is too much face time with the world for me. Too much public interaction. Too much high impact interaction with strangers. Granted, many of those strangers become friends, people you enjoy seeing and have more or less personal conversations with. I still think about some of my customers every day! I’m lucky that many of my customers have allowed me to call them friends. But for the most part, I dislike talking to hundreds of people every week. Just choose not to do it. Because this is a free country and I get to choose. {So do you!}
No. 2 I needed more private, introspective, alone time. {I don’t yet have kids, so I still get this regularly.} Here’s the deal: we’re all programmed, on a DNA level, to need certain elements to feel okay. I’m not talking about liking Doritos or wanting to watch reruns of 24. I’m talking about how some people need generous doses of sunlight to feel normal. Or they need eight hours of sleep a night to function. These aren’t “nice to have’s”. These are needs. To stay sane. I need down time away from humanity. I need to go into my mental cocoon to find peace. I need this about once a day for about two hours. I didn’t get that regularly with the store. And that was incredibly painful. I knew that just closing the store would restore this area of my life and my soul to me.
So that, in a rather large nutshell, is why I left indie retail and closed my store forever. Yes, forever.
I recently had lunch with a friend who’s somewhat connected to the boutique industry. She has an enviable job writing for an online cooking and decor-oriented portal site. We hadn’t seen each other in years and I had to catch her up on why I left retail. She looked a bit puzzled when she asked, “So, retailers hire you to coach them when you didn’t want to have your own boutique?” I laughed and told her, “Yeah, I guess I’m the retail coach who hates retail.” She was quiet for one beat, then burst out laughing and said, “That’s actually pretty cool! You probably have a pretty objective perspective on the industry then.”
So let me clarify. I definitely don’t hate retail. I hate the way stuff is elevated in our society to such crazy importance. I hate the way traditional sales marketing techniques make me feel. I hate discounters who feed the desire of consumers to get the world for a song, thus devaluing the production of quality goods made with integrity by people trying to make an honest living and sustain their communities.
I love entrepreneurship. And I love a great business concept that wears a retail model. I love a business that creates a compelling experience for its customers.
And I know the boutique industry. I’ve had some pretty life-defining experiences there, good and bad. I can help indie retailers and artists get clear about what they want in the boutique industry and define the most efficient path for them to get there. I can help them avoid the common and not-so-common pitfalls of the industry. If you’re someone involved in the boutique industry and this is what you know you need right now, check out how I may be able to help.
And Nick, thanks for asking that great question. As every indie knows, you often don’t find the help you need until you ask.
In the comments, I’d love to hear from indie retailers. Can you identify with what I’ve shared here? Where do you think I’m off the mark in my estimation of what it takes to make it in this biz?
Indie designers and crafters, have you had similar experiences with growing your own business?
Passionate indie shoppers, what have I shared here that helped you see your local retailers in a new light?
Hello, you.