Opening a new brick and mortar shop 13 13

[mr_highgrade]

Good to see you back on the boards House. Good luck with the comic shop. BTW, what ever happened to that Goth chic that used to work for you? 

[the blob]

$5000 on a sign sounds like a lot. It seems to me that the women with a 9 year old in tow look9ng for a safe space are a different group than will be attracted to a shop via social media.

[MyNameIsLegion]

[1Cool]

Great read so far.  Love the details and although I'll probably never open a shop it's been fun following along.

[DeadOne]

Great read @lighthouse. I'm very much looking forward to more.

[Dan82]

That was great reading. Good luck.

For no other reason than, so I know, what did your research determine was the optimal 'Butt brush' distance? That cracked me up it really did. You've thought of everything man.

[Domo Arigato]

12 hours ago, lighthouse said:

Placeholder 4 has been completed. I will get back to Placeholder 5 tomorrow if I have time.

Did you get any better at Connect 4 in China?

[revat]

any chance you took pictures along the way?

[lighthouse]

12 hours ago, mr_highgrade said:

Good to see you back on the boards House. Good luck with the comic shop. BTW, what ever happened to that Goth chic that used to work for you? 

Her dream was to become an Egyptologist.

I like to think that somewhere out there is a 32yo female Egyptologist who still dyes a small purple streak in her hair and has fond memories of selling copies of Patrick The Wolf Boy.

But I honestly don't know.
 

But in a similar vein... here is a partial list of current occupations of my former employees from the first two shops:

Doctor of Chinese Medicine
Tax Accountant
Game Designer for WOTC
Franchise Owner of two Great Clips locations
Special Education High School Teacher
Owner of Auto Repair Shop

All claim my comic shops in their work history. I tell current employees they have high standards to live up to... But I also remind them that two of my former employees died before the age of 24, so never take life for granted. In the immortal words of Marlo Stanfield, "Tomorrow ain't promised to no one."

[lighthouse]

9 hours ago, the blob said:

$5000 on a sign sounds like a lot. It seems to me that the women with a 9 year old in tow look9ng for a safe space are a different group than will be attracted to a shop via social media.

The sign is 14 feet wide with individual channel letters, and that price included installation that was mandated (by terms of my lease) to be performed by union labor. It also included the roughly $800 in local permit fees. It's more than 4 times what I paid for any sign at my previous shops, but it was what was required to be in this location. Part of what comes with having an A location is accepting a huge stack of regulations on what you can and cannot do.

And you might be surprised. While many 28-32yo women are "too young" for Facebook, they tend to wind up there anyway because their older relatives expect them to be sharing pics of the kids on a regular basis. We did quite well in reaching the 25-34 female demographic with our Facebook advertising. And the conversion rate for event signups was more than adequate (we gave away free TPBs to everyone who signed up for the event in advance).

[lighthouse]

2 hours ago, Dan82 said:

That was great reading. Good luck.

For no other reason than, so I know, what did your research determine was the optimal 'Butt brush' distance? That cracked me up it really did. You've thought of everything man.

To be honest we would have preferred to keep all aisles at 40-42". But there are limitations in store design that meant we had to be closer to 38" in most places. ADA requires that aisles be a minimum of 36" for wheelchair accessibility. But part of how you can adjust the butt brush distance is by keeping people standing. (And credit where credit is due, much of what I have learned about store design in my decade away from retail has come from Google, Google, and more Google. I've purchased a few retail design books over the years, but most of it was just reading article after article about shopping behavior.)

In the areas where we have shelves of TPBs and HCs, people will naturally wind up crouched down to check lower shelves. So those aisles have to be wider to accommodate the extra room that people will take up. We target 44-46" between bookshelves for this reason. There still won't be room for two people to be crouched directly behind each other, but there is room for someone to walk past a crouching person without touching them. In the rest of the store, there is no accessible merchandise below waist level, and any merchandise in showcases below waist level is arranged so that it is fully visible while standing with no crouch needed.

Yes, the occasional 350lb+ customer is going to take up more aisle room than average, but as long as that customer is standing, they don't impede traffic flow to any significant degree.

[Dr. Love]

brilliant thread

[thunsicker]

23 hours ago, lighthouse said:

Our official Grand Opening was a one day event on a Friday. We had just over 600 people through the door. We had 16 entries for the costume contest. And we did $1.81 per foot in sales on that Friday. We had over 500 people through the door on Saturday, and another 350 or so through the door on Sunday.

By $1.81 per foot do you mean per customer, per square foot of the store, or actually per foot (*2 per customer).

Also as you are self funding have you figured out how and when to call it quits if you aren't making targets?

[lighthouse]

2 hours ago, Domo Arigato said:

Did you get any better at Connect 4 in China?

I got better at many things in China. Including eating Magnum ice cream bars in below-freezing weather. There is nothing like the horrified look you get walking to the farmer's market in short sleeves when it's -8ºC slowly eating a Magnum Dark Chocolate. People in Dongbei, like most in China, are terrified of getting cold. And seeing a foreigner eating ice cream in fall* was positively horrifying.

But there is nothing like eating ice cream that never melts no matter how slow you eat it. Highly recommended.

*I say "fall", because winter temps were typically a high of -15ºC and a low of -29ºC... even I wasn't eating ice cream outside then

[sfcityduck]

19 hours ago, sfcityduck said:

Where and what is the name of your store?

My desire to know has nothing to do with internet or mail order business.  Instead, while I enjoy your writing style, it is hard for me to evaluate the value of your advice and experience without knowing where and what the name of your store is. Your location says SF (where I am), but up thread you professed to have no real connection to the Bay Area.  So why not just come clean with those two details?  

[HouseofComics.Com]

I assume he was planning on dropping the location and store name at the end of placeholder five.

[BlowUpTheMoon]

23 hours ago, lighthouse said:

During that 8 weeks we processed and sorted 110 long boxes of back issue comics

How did you obtain 110 long boxes? 

Edited August 28, 2018 by BlowUpTheMoon
greggy is a dork

[Pirate]

Be really funny if like usual Lighthouse was full of and is hanging out with Calamerica writing this bunk.  I would be dropping my business name.

[lighthouse]

Just now, thunsicker said:

By $1.81 per foot do you mean per customer, per square foot of the store, or actually per foot (*2 per customer).

Also as you are self funding have you figured out how and when to call it quits if you aren't making targets?

LOL... per square foot. I'd hate to have to count actual feet with how many canine customers come in...

Gross sales figures are irrelevant, it's sales per square foot that actually gives you a usable metric.

For comparison, Apple leads the way in retail with over $5500 per square foot in annual sales. Tiffany winds up around $2700. Coach around $1700.
Stores like TJ Maxx, Ross, and Gap wind up in the $300-375 range most years.
Small bookstores currently average around $150-180 per foot, while Barnes and Noble hovers just over $200 now, after being in the $250 range just a few years ago.
Toy and Hobby Shops have historically sat in the $190-220 range per foot.

But everything is relative... Macerich, the REIT owner of several prestigious malls, including Tysons Corner Center, the Queens Center mall in Elmhurst, and The Village at Corte Madera in SF, reported that their sales last year averaged $660 a foot across all properties, and they also reported their average rents at $57/ft per year. Simon Property Group sits at $631 and $53. Taubman at $810 and $62... All these numbers are padded, of course by the extreme outliers at the top end. An Apple store in a mall drags all the numbers up.

And malls need a tenant mix. You can't have an entire mall filled with Jewelry, Food Court, Mens Shoes, and Women's Accessories (all categories that clock $500+ per foot). You have to mix in some childrens clothing, women's clothing, sporting goods, etc (categories that clock under $325 per foot).

So even though my original business plan called for just $170 per foot in sales the first year, the landlord was happy to take us on as a tenant because we added to the mix in the center.

Exit strategy? It's hard to say. The only obligations I had to personally guarantee were those to Diamond. Everything else is on the other side of. the moat. But I essentially went into this process with the idea that every dollar I was putting in could potentially be lost. I still maintain my professional certifications, and could still return to a salaried life elsewhere if I chose. But the store would have to be doing catastrophically bad for me to consider that. I admit I was still pondering backup plans the first couple weeks. But haven't since.

[lighthouse]

2 hours ago, revat said:

any chance you took pictures along the way?

A few... but not nearly as many as I wish I would have.

I've seen Avenue Q at the New World Stages theater a half dozen times... and I still fall prey to "I wish I had taken more pictures".