Only half way through our annual sample  sale, we had already had our best sale ever.  It’s such a strange thing.  As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the sale isn’t a big profit maker, but it brings in quite a few people and moves along some old inventory making room for our new samples, hopefully creates cash flow in a slow time of the year, and if nothing else, gives us an excuse to get our name out there with what little advertising we do.  Simple business strategy.  

Here is the strange part.  The first time we ran this sale, it was sort of an afterthought: we decided to do it some time between Christmas and New Years that first time – the sale running the first couple weeks of January.  That time the sale went very well and we emptied the store.  That was great, but then we quickly found out that we had just that: an empty store in the middle of January.  I had no containers arriving until mid-February and we had no new floor samples (new sofas, tables etc), on the way either.  Empty stores are not the look you really want to go for as a retailer.  

Fast forward to the next year’s sample sale.  This time I planned for it at the end of November.  I budgeted according to the previous year’s sale and ordered a bunch of new floor pieces (again, sofas, tables etc) and scheduled buying trips over seas so that those containers would arrive the end of January as well.  All this inventory coming in at the end of the month, perfect timing for the end of what should be a good sample sale at the beginning of the month.  This also means paying for all of that inventory during January with the piles of money we were of course going to take in during the sample sale.  Well obviously, because of all this brilliant planning, the second sample sale (last year's), was a complete dud.  As a result, we had all of this inventory coming in, and all of these bills for said inventory coming in on top of an already full store during a slow cash flow time of year.  It’s at times like those that you are either happy to have millions of dollars in the bank, or have to reluctantly go and get a loan.  Guess which one of those scenarios we have.  Hello bank.  The glamour of a small and under-funded small business.   


The tough part is we are always trying to grow the business without taking on too much debt.  As a result, every dime we make immediately turns into inventory.  This keeps us constantly on the edge as far as money goes.  Its very much a hand to mouth business, especially when you are trying to grow on your own (without having to go after investors).  With our buying trips over seas we have to lay out quite a bit of money.  It’s not worth it to go overseas and only buy a few things, so we buy a lot.  But then, of course, you pay for everything shortly after the buying trip, but the container won’t arrive for you to sell those things usually for another two to three months.  On top of that, with the manufacturing we are now doing, the minimum orders to have your own things produced are quite high, so when we start a new product line with a new vendor, we have to fork out quite a bit of money, again for pieces that won’t show up for up to six or seven months.  This is a longer process because we are designing pieces, which then a sample of each design has to be made, then we somehow have to see the sample, make changes, have another sample made, hopefully approve it, then put it into production, order enough of each piece to meet their minimums, get it over here seven months later and hope that people like what we designed so we can sell all of the pieces we had to buy.  That’s if everything goes smoothly (I will refer you to an earlier entry that we could call “the embezzling ceramics sales person”).

Back to this year’s sample sale.  So we have one sale that was a thriving success (two years ago), and one that was a dud (last year's).  No rhyme or reason between the two.  Some times people feel like shopping, sometimes they don’t.  This year I hedged my bets.  On the one hand I don't want to order a bunch of things that will arrive in late January and suddenly have to pay for them all then - and end up having a bad sale and no cash flow.  On the other hand, what if we have a great sale and no product on the way to fill an empty store? So this time I ordered a few larger pieces in November from our vendors so they would arrive at the end of January, and had a buying trip to Thailand that should have a container arriving the end of February.  Add to that that our client base has gotten used to the sample sale and all the good deals at it, and we sent out our low cost post cards announcing the sale as well as an announcement to our new client e-mail list.  In addition to that, I had jokingly in the e-mail ended the notification saying “It’s a really great sale.  Tell your friends.  Notify the media.”  Turns out there are a few media people on our e-mail list that took it seriously and put the sale in the local paper, web sites etc.  In addition to that, our clients took the “tell your friends” part seriously as well.  Lastly, the sale is really a great sale, and people that come in know that.  All of these things coming together, as well as pretty signs that we had made and hung in the window that simply said “Annual Sample Sale,” Emily (our fantastic new-ish store manager) working her selling magic, and of course my charming Irish disposition . . .probably more the pretty signs and Emily’s selling voodoo, made for an amazing sale.  Sorry, that was an amazingly long run on sentence, but you get the point.  

So to sum up: art historian shop owner gets all his ducks in a row, and with a little luck thanks to our client’s promoting the sale in their various ways, and we have a fantastic sale.  This gets our year off to a great start.  We have some wonderful containers on the way from over seas, and some great new furniture pieces coming in from the lines we carry in our shop, all funded by the sale rather than leveraging our first born with the bank. Of course by doing that, we have already spent all of the money we made during the sale on all of this new inventory.  Its a never ending cycle.  The good news is all of this means we are growing.  The whole growing thing leads into a larger conversation about businesses and how large one want to become.  that discussion I will get into at a later date.  The short answer is I haveno desire to become some behemith with thousands of employees.  I prefer a small scale busness model.  The big trick is being able to recognize when you are at that "big enough" stage.

Next week we have the New York Show that we have a booth at.  It’s a great show where shop owners big and small from around the country (anyone from Target to shops my size, to designers), come to buy things.  It’s mainly a middle-upper end accessory show.  We focus on showing our production pieces there and not so much of our one of a kind things.  It’s exciting because the show has a strong interiors trend focus.  It’s where we (along with the other vendors) introduce all of our new designs and see if we have hit the nail on the head, or hit our thumb instead.  There are two shows a year here, one now, and one in August.  Truth be told, the August one is usually the best, but this one is still a good one.  The down side with January is there are so many shows running around the country that retailers have to choose from, that I think all the shows get a little diluted as a result.  Fortunately, New York City itself is a draw for the type of client that is interested in our sort of products, so our clients typically choose to go to the New York show rather than the others.  Needless to say, I will let you know how things go.

Well, yet again what I thought was going to be a short entry turns into a not so short one.   As I have said before, that’s three to four minutes of your life you will never get back.  Sorry about that.