Originally Posted by
OzarksGma
....I just closed my large store and built a 1200 sq.ft. warehouse style building...outcry from my customers.... I decided to be open 3 days a week... If they don't support the shop now, I will re-evaluate in a year and it will close and become my studio and I will do some designing and quilting.
Thanks for posting OzarksGma.
Am I right in guessing that your new warehouse building is also next to your home so you don’t have to commute to a store? Did you offer any services (Longarm, alterations, sewing) at your big store, or will you now in the smaller building? I see you said that if you close the business you may use it as a studio.
We’re set up to do about the same thing if need be, and have talked about it, except we’ll probably look at turning our retail shop into a retail warehouse if the time comes. It’s only 6 blocks from our home, and is an old style brick building in what used to be part of a bustling downtown shopping area. It’s not too much larger than your warehouse building at 1700 sq.ft., but has a 14-ft high ceiling in it, so we can go fairly high if we’re just operating as a warehouse.
We do ironing, alterations, mending, and repairs in our retail shop now, and it’s about 25% of our business. If we get to where we don’t want to do the services, we’ll probably convert to a warehouse-type retail sales operation. We’d have the added cost of an online shopping cart website, but I do all of our website work now anyway and would probably continue to do so. Cutting fabric and filling orders should take a lot less time than the 9+ hrs/day, 5-days/week that we’re working now.
If worse comes to worst, we’ll turn it into our personal fabric stash, and maybe have the biggest one in the area. Everything’s paid for, so we can lock the doors anytime that we want to.
CD in Oklahoma