An odd little business that is doing well
A few days ago we were out with friends for a birthday outing and I saw a bead store. That’s right: beads. It was in a shopping center that is made to look like a park, and the anchor store there is a women’s fitness center. There are a lot of female-oriented retailers there (jewelers, hair stylists, tanning center, boutiques of various descriptions) as well as a dentist and a few eateries. It’s the perfect place for a craft supply business. There is lots of traffic, and it’s the kind of people who buy beads.
I marveled at this sight, because I know that it is not cheap to have a store in this center. And the utilities in this town are an absolute punishment. They had to sell a LOT of beads to pay for the rent and electricity, let alone pull a paycheck or two out of it. Then I forgot about it, until the next day, when I saw ANOTHER BEAD STORE at the shopping center just across the street! I thought that this was just crazy! How can two bead stores, located in the same part of town, survive? I thought about it, and realized that the markup on beads had to be enormous. This got me thinking about the window cleaning business. There is a very low cost of entry, and the profits are quite high. You don’t need a store or utilities. There is just your own cost of living, and a fairly small investment in equipment.
There are only two dedicated bead stores in this town, Bead All About It and Gifts of Avalon. There are also some craft stores like Michaels, and there are the craft departments of stores like Wal-Mart and Target and others. Yet, in spite of the big stores with their cheap beads, two entrepreneurs dared to open these stores and depend on their bead sales to stay alive. I have to admire that.
In our business, we compete with full service cleaning services, do-it-yourselfers, and a high tolerance for dirt. We just need to find a couple of jobs every day to survive, but these bead stores probably have to have dozens of customers every day just to keep the doors open. How do they do it? By making beads special. Go to their web sites and read the descriptions. We can learn something from them.
