High gas is good for rural retailer Shades of Green
By Lauren Heist
Like many retailers, Julie Green, owner of Shades of Green in Rochester, MN, has had to operate in the shadow of a big box store. So to differentiate her store, Green started carrying more fashion and gift items in addition to home accessories.
Here, Green talks about store merchandising, keeping a variety of products and how high gas prices have actually helped her sales.
Julie Green: We have three floors. Upstairs, we do clothing and funny T-shirts… and fun, knock-off purses [that look] like Coach, Louis Vuitton and Prada… And then downstairs we have a mix of things: A big section of cards and a wine area with a whole bunch of wine gadgets… We have home décor stuff, too. We have vases and pots and lamps and shades and… we have furniture.
[When we started six years ago] we were more home décor and now we’re still more home décor, but now we’re more gift-y and gifts for the girlfriends. We have very economical — $10, $15, $20 — just fun gifts that you can give to your girlfriends from painted wine glasses to martini glasses to diffusers to key holders, napkins, you name it.
[I changed our product offerings] honestly because of our T.J. Maxx. We have our T.J. Maxx in town, and it’s one of the nicer ones… They started to carry home décor, so I saw the focus change from home décor because I try not to do what everyone else is doing. Bottom line is I’m trying to figure out what they don’t have… What I did was go gift-y to carry things they don’t have…
My store is very, very colorful, all of the displays. My husband is really a handyman, and he’s painted a bunch of different things. And I carry things with a sense of humor…
I carry a huge variety of different products. I get small minimum orders from different companies so I can have a big variety, and that keeps people’s interest… [I recommend] not buying volumes of stuff. Maybe at one time I would buy from companies where you had to buy six of things [but I’ve found] you definitely need to keep it at the lowest minimum you can and then get different things…
[The high gas prices have been good for me]. I’m about an hour-and-a-half, two hours from Minneapolis… [and normally] a lot of my clients do shop in the cities. But my numbers have gone up in the last year, actually. It’ll be interesting to see if maybe they’re going to stay in town, and I haven’t figured it out quite yet, but my numbers have actually gone up the last year… Maybe they’ll buy more local and not go into the cities. And we have a lot of resort-y towns that are about three or four hours away, and maybe they’re skipping their gift stores and staying more in town. I’ve heard people are going to have more patio parties and pool parties, so maybe they're going to stay more local… So far it’s been great…
Word of mouth is my best advertising I’ve found. If I keep exciting things in here, that’s probably been my best advertising. Where the person will wear it if it’s a purse or clothing and then tell the next person.
