Single-Minded Merchants : To succeed, super-specialty retailers must overwhelm buyers with wackiness or inundate them with endless variations on a single item.
Phyllis Cowan crossed a fine line in retailing five years ago when she decided to leave the lamp business and start selling an item that more and more customers kept requesting: light bulbs. Lots of light bulbs. All shapes and sizes and colors of light bulbs.
“Everybody thought it was crazy,” said Cowan, owner of Light Bulbs Unlimited in Santa Monica. “Nobody could really believe that you could have a store just selling light bulbs.”
Well you can, and Cowan does. With the help of sons Peter and Robin, Cowan is about to launch a third Light Bulbs Unlimited in the Los Angeles area and has also franchised two in Orange County.
Gary Dorothy remembers a similar reaction from his friends when he revealed plans to open a store selling nothing but rubber stamps in 1984.
“They were very caring about me but they didn’t want to encourage me to do something so ludicrous,” said Dorothy, whose store, called Stampa Barbara, bills itself as the world’s largest rubber stamp store. Dorothy also owns a version on trendy Melrose Avenue, an outlet much smaller than the 75,000-stamp mother store.
This is not business as usual.
In this era of specialty retailing, shoppers are no longer surprised by many of the stores they encounter.
Merchants carrying nothing but T-shirts or earrings or Christmas decorations or sweat clothes or sunglasses or music boxes or model trains don’t jolt a dedicated buyer’s spending urge the way that they once did. Retailers specializing in ties, socks and even hats are, frankly, old hat.
But among the specialists is a subset of salesmanship that might be called niche marketing, super-specialty retailing or just plain old weird stores.
Consider the following:
- The Wound & Wound Toy Co. on Melrose (formerly known as Wound ‘Em Up and The Last Wound Up) concentrates on things that wind up: items such as wind-up chattering teeth and antique music boxes. Prices range from $1 to $500.
- Stephens Zippers of Pasadena sells and repairs zippers. At 6 cents per inch, “it’s not terribly lucrative, but it’s my thing,” owner Daniel E. Whitlow said.
- House of Canes & Walking Sticks in North Hollywood carries those items starting at $10.95. Antiques can cost a few thousand dollars. “We’re told all the time that people are so happy we exist so they don’t have to have just a drugstore cane,” said Kay Fontaine, who took over the store with her husband, Mark, in 1980 from the original owner.
These types of stores tend to divide into two camps that might be dubbed Whimsy Gone Wild and The Mundane Multiplied.
Falling into the first group is the entire menagerie of animal-themed stores--from the more common teddy bear and cat stores to the more unusual, like Pig Heaven Gallery in Laguna Beach and Udderly Perfect in Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach. An Orange County retailer called House of Lampshades, an excellent companion to Light Bulbs Unlimited, belongs in the second category, as does Plastic Mart of Santa Monica, which peddles a plethora of plastic items and does custom work in acrylic and Lucite.
Such stores are reminiscent of the old “Saturday Night Live” television show sketch about the Scotch Tape store. It had very few customers, which the tartan-clad owners blamed on the new mall down the street rather than on the fact that they sold nothing but Scotch Tape.
In real life, many super-specialty stores appear to be thriving.
Retail consultant Larry Ebel described it as a “harnesses-for-sea horses” phenomenon that represents the ultimate in retailing’s move away from general, no-frills stores where customers had to fend for themselves back to the service-oriented specialty outlets that were the norm in the early part of the century.
Specialty Bookstores
“It’s not totally revolutionary,” said Ebel, senior vice president of Retail Planning Associates, a retail planning and consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio. “In Paris, you can go to a store that sells just ribbons or antique posters.
“Now, so many people have so many bases covered that if you’re not different, the competition is even more fierce,” he said. “If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and there’s not the stigma in failing in retailing that there once was.”
Very specific stores have benefited too from an “upscaling” of regional shopping centers that would not have been able to support unusual stores several years ago, Ebel said.
Some independent bookstores went to specialization partly as a haven from the well-financed bookstore chains that flourished in the past decade, said John K. Baker, editor of Publishers Weekly, a trade publication. Now bookstores selling only mysteries, science fiction, travel books, guidebooks or books for children are becoming more common, he said.
“I think it’s in response to the outpouring from specialized publishers that chains, in their much more generalized approach, don’t seem able to stock and sell,” Baker said.
Lest one think that the unusual is confined only to Southern California, extremely specialized retailers can be found in most major metropolitan areas, although “it’s hard to find the equivalent of Melrose in Columbus, Ohio,” Ebel said.
New York is home not only to Just Bulbs and Just Shades, but to Tender Buttons, a veritable museum of such clothing closures. Cleveland has Just Bags, which has been selling women’s handbags for 13 years.
Washington boasts The Map Store (it sells maps) and Political Americana (it sells political memorabilia). The Detroit area apparently has enough demand for sequins to support three branches of House of Sequins.
These super-specialized merchants say they survive because they provide a certain expertise or scratch a certain consumer itch that other retailers don’t.
House of Batteries in Costa Mesa regularly sees customers who are referred by consumer electronic, drug and department stores, said owner Bill Lusk. The store sells or makes batteries for “pretty much anything that takes a battery,” including watches, cameras, calculators and hearing aids.
Cowan of Light Bulbs Unlimited can speak for hours about the benefits of the pure white of halogen bulbs, the long life of mercury vapor bulbs and the merits of various shades of white florescent bulbs. Her stores also do custom neon work and sell a small selection of unusual lamps.
Dorothy said he and the staff of Stampa Barbara have picked up more than one customer who flew into town only to visit the rubber stamp store.
The life span of strange stores can be relatively short as fads fade.
Jason Walker, owner of The Bear Tree in Anaheim, said the 6-year-old store stopped selling only bears and bear-related merchandise a few years ago because customers kept asking for other animals.
“We sell about 3 to 1, bears versus other plush animals, but we would hate to lose that one,” he said.
“When you rely on one product, if your product goes so goes your store,” Dorothy said. Still, that prospect doesn’t bother him, Dorothy said.
“I worry about a lot of things, but that’s not very high on my list,” he said. Rubber stampers “are real devotees. People come from Timbuktu to shop here.”
Everything Sells Itself
Wound & Wound owner Jody Golub said his store has been going strong for four years on a cross-section of toy collectors, impulse buyers and office workers looking for something unusual to jazz up their desks.
“We just entertain people,” he said. “We move them from place to place in the store, and everything sells itself.”
Some of these companies do have long track records.
Whitlow of Stephens Zippers has sold and fixed zippers for about 23 years. House of Batteries has hummed along for 20 years. Plastic Mart grew out of a fiberglass surfboard repair business that owner Ralph Nahigian started 28 years ago.
