Tiny Space, Big Impact
In New York, a small store sells itself.
By Meredith Schwartz -- Gifts and Dec, 2/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
At 400 square feet, Random Accessories gift store is smaller than even most Manhattan apartments. But to owner Lynn Freidus, it is actually a step up. She moved the store to its current location in New York City’s hip East Village three years ago from
an even smaller store in chic and pricey SoHo. “This is 400 square feet with my stock room. The old one was barely 300 square feet,” she explains. “I had no stockroom in the old one — I kept things in nooks and crannies, and in my living room at Christmas time.”
Because of the store’s size and narrow configuration, retail tools like events or big displays are out of the question. She resists the temptation to pack the space with maximum merchandise. People often say she’s wasting the space on her back wall and behind the cashwrap, but she feels it’s important to preserve white space to keep the product from becoming overwhelming.
Something for Everyone
Freidus’ buying philosophy boils down to “a gift for just about everyone I know at a reasonable price.” Her merchandise mix tends toward the funny and funky, but that wasn’t always the case.
“I had no children’s and no novelty in the beginning,” she says. “I came from the jewelry world so I had lots of silver jewelry, and a lot of home and bath. Then after 9/11 it became obvious that the novelty stuff was what kept us going, plus as the baby stuff got more to my taste I bought more.”
Today, baby is the engine that drives Random Accessories’ profits. “It can be 50 percent [of sales] even though it is only 10 percent of my space,” says Freidus. People often ask her why she doesn’t expand her baby section, but that would mean squeezing out everything else. “I don’t want to be a baby store. I think that is how people go out of business,” says Freidus, if they’ve become too specialized and then trends change.
Random by Nature
Random Accessories’ most successful promotions have found Freidus rather than the other way around. “A long time ago I tried a mailing but it wasn’t worth it,” she says. The store was found by Lucky magazine as well as Time Out “because their office was next door to my old store.”
Actress Susan Sarandon purchased a tape measure, which appeared in InStyle and sold 4,000 units. As for online ventures, “Yelp is doing well for us. We didn’t put ourselves on there, a customer did.”
However, once serendipity opens the door, Freidus walks through. She brought items to the Time Out editor’s office, and added photos to the store’s Yelp profile, as well as an invitation to join the shop’s Facebook page, created in October 2009. And she plans to add an ecommerce site for the store in 2010.
We would love your feedback!
No related articles for this topic.
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
