6.5.07

Well I know all three of you readers out there are patiently waiting for another insightful look into the inner workings of Bjorling & Grant. Well here you go. It’s the first few days of June and we have a number of things on our plate for the next few months. I am not sure which event to start with, so naturally I’m opting for the more schizophrenic approach to writing and will hop around from subject to subject.

I have always wanted to have a large warehouse space where I could bring together my retail showroom and wholesale business in one large area, separated by some free standing wall:  the showroom area nice and open with lots of space around settings so people can come in and not be so overwhelmed by the strange objects and different things going on, the warehouse area. . . a warehouse. I also like the more museum setting look, while still having that comfortable “lived in” feel that so many of our Twin Cities retail customers seem to like. Our shop seems to be sort of a refuge where people come in and feel immediately at home. Now, not that we want to serve as a place for people to loiter about when they should be out living productive lives, or more importantly when they should be actively trying to buy things in our shop rather than lolly-gagging about lounging on our comfy sofas and chairs (actually I sincerely love it when people come in here simply to hang out in our little refuge). Now they will be able to do that in a big airy space in our new warehouse . . . which we have yet to find.

Here is the issue. Our wholesale business is a great driving force for us, and it is growing at a nice and steady rate. The problem is we have no loading dock at our current location, nor do we have an easily accessible warehouse here. Picture any number of containers pulling up outside the front of our current shop on the busy street, us unloading 500-1000 pieces from the container down onto the ground, unpacking it outside the store, trying to get as much of the various molds –which could supply the CDC with research sample for decades- off our merchandise, drag it all through the middle of our pretty showroom, stuff all of the invariably heavy stuff in a back room, and drag the rest of it down a confined staircase to the basement, only then to haul it all back upstairs piece by piece to pack it up in the middle of our afore-mentioned pretty showroom, clutter up the front of the shop with boxes and pallets waiting to get picked up by UPS and the various freight companies that work the country. It’s not a very convenient set up.

We are now looking at a couple warehouses with loading docs and huge (huge to us), open rooms with nice concrete floors that work well for my vision of not only the showroom (think clean industrial surrounds with clean lined furniture and our odd objects from around the world, maybe some sort of simple water feature in the middle as our new home for our resident four coy fish that are fast outgrowing their huge Thai pot), but also great for doing all the restoration, re-finishing, packing dragging, cleaning, sorting separating, storing, shipping and general labor that goes into the wholesale end of our business. We should be going from our current 3000 square feet to a little over 7000. The catch is we are going off the beaten path. Not that our current location is all that well beaten. It’s in the middle of one of the great old Minneapolis neighborhoods (a very supportive neighborhood, I should add, which I will miss), around 2 miles from any reasonable freeway. The warehouse we are currently looking at is by no means in a retail area, but once our clients find it, it’s simple to get to. The big question is how much do I want to pay for that. This guy wants around $2 a square foot more than a less easily located warehouse would, and when you add that up over the course of a year, it’s an additional $14,000 which is a lot of money for little old us. But if it’s easier for our retail and local designer clients to get to, one would think the added cost would well pay for itself. . . but if we go to a more obscure place, wouldn’t those same people come and find us? Maybe, maybe not. Retail is a fickle business. If you are not driving by a place, it’s not in your mind all that often, so you aren’t stopping by all that much. But if we go further off the map, I think we will become more of an event driven place for our local clients. Things like announcing the arrival of containers and throwing a party or “container opening” day or gimmicks like that. But if that sort of thing would work at an obscure location, why not do it at the more expensive place and have that much more business from putting a little effort into throwing events. I don’t know. Ultimately the decision might simply come down to my mood on the day I have to decide: if I had a good cup of coffee that morning, if the bit of fish we ate the night before was just right, if its raining, what the day’s barometric pressure is. You know, logical, strategic business decisions. I forgot to mention, the expensive place has two loading docks, at the front and one at the back. More importantly the two at the front face south, so we can put in all glass garage doors in each one to let in all that nice southern light, and we can leave them wide open during the hot summer months, and yes to those of you who are not in Minnesota, it gets nice and hot here so having them flung open like this during the two days of summer with the breeze coming in and going out the open dock door at the other end would be fantastic. Or do I try and save $14,000 a year.

Anyway, we are also setting up to have three great shipments come in, all in July. One small shipment from my trip to South Africa. Its only around 5 cubic meters, but its all of these great tribal pieces collected from all across the southern half of Africa. Not that typical African import shop stuff, but unusual pieces. I have yet to post photos of it all in the “stuff on the way page.” When I get the right size images of it all, and if we have your e-mail, you will get our usual announcement and link to that page so you can see it all. The shipment that arrives after that will be a race between a container from Northern Thailand filled with ceramics and natural objects like curly vines and root consoles, butterfly tables (these are all things that you can see on our web site), and a container from India (quite a bit of which you can see in our “stuff on the way page” right now). Lastly I was able to come up with 10-12 of these great Danish wall paper rollers that we have been turning into lamps. Quite a few people fell in love with them at the High Point Show, but the few that we had sold right away (good for us, not good for the people who fell in love with them but were too late). Well now we have 10-12 more on offer, not photographed yet, but they will be soon – like in the next two weeks – and yet again, there will be an email directing you to our “fresh off the boat page” even though technically these are not off the boat.

So it’s a big move at the end of the summer. Of course we will have some big moving sale, not only to generate some cash, but also to make our move easier. It will be along the same lines as our January sale – so not all that interesting to our pout of town wholesale clients, but a great deal for our local clients who can come in a and walk out with the embarrassingly low priced things. More to come on that sale later.