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This is part one of a 3 part blog on one airbrush studios process of transitioning from a Brick and Mortar store to doing Online sales and Events. We will talk about what it was like closing our Retail location after almost 30 years of Brick and Mortar studios and the challenges that came along with learning how to navigate the world of having an online business and combining it with an events business…neither of which require an actual public location.
So let’s dive right in….
First, this is an article that I never thought I would be writing, simply because I never thought we would be without a Brick and Mortar location. However in February 2019, after almost 30 years, we closed our Mall location to transition into doing online orders and to concentrate on the Airbrush Entertainment Events part of the business as well as continue to operate our Waterpark location. We are basically testing the waters on not having an actual year round location. It did not turn out the way we thought it would so keep reading to learn some good lessons.
The two main reasons for closing the retail location were that the mall we were in was suffering and also, it was time to come to grips with the effect ONLINE business was having on brick and mortar retail.
First, let me give you a quick background on how Anything Airbrushed plus came about.
In early Spring of 1991 I was teaching airbrush illustration at a local art college. My students had expressed an interest in learning how to do T-shirts….something I had only dabbled in once or twice. So I quickly learned the ins and outs of how to do airbrushed t-shirts and thought it would be great if the students could learn to do this and make money at it. I talked with a friend of mine Brian Knecht who was working at a art supply store in one of the area malls. He would always set up in front of the store and demonstrate hand painting on clothing….he would occasionally use an airbrush. As it turns out, a T-shirt shop (T-shirts plus) was opening upstairs in that mall so I asked Brian if he would be interested in approaching the owner with me about having an airbrush artist in his shop. The idea was Brian and I would get it set up, train the students how to do t-shirts and then I can bow out and go on with my illustration career and yet have a place where all my future students could work part time and earn money using their artistic talents.
Fast forward to May of 1991, the owner of T-shirts plus agreed and Brian and I got the ball rolling and started the airbrushing out of that shop while I taught my students how to do t-shirts so that by the Christmas season they would be ready.
Come October of that year, the owner backed out of the deal and said he didn’t want my students to work, he wanted just me and Brian. I said No and walked out…Brian stayed fora while and eventually left and opened Strictly Air in Dayton Ohio(now Awesome Airbrush)
Anything Airbrushed started as a seasonal cart in Cincinnati Ohio’s Forest Fair Mall in 1991
That left me with the problem of going back to the students and telling them they wouldn’t be able to do shirts in the mall during Christmas.
So…instead of having to break that news to them, I scraped together $5000.00 with the help my brother and opened my own temporary cart in another local Mall for the Christmas season just so I could keep the promise to my students. So on November 19th, 1991 Anything Airbrushed was born.
We did so well for those first 5 weeks that people said I would be crazy to close after Christmas, so I didn’t and that is how I got into the Airbrush Shop business. The school where I taught is now gone but we have continued the tradition of hiring nothing but art students. See our post on “How to hire Airbrush Artists” for more information on how we do our hiring.
Since the beginning we have had multiple locations throughout the Cincinnati area. We have a local Waterpark location and we are one of the Mid-Wests premier Airbrush Events Company.
The pictures above shows our Studio in 2017 vs what the Mall is now in 2020. You can see by the bottom two pictures that there are no more stores in that wing. When we left in February 2019 we still had Journeys across from us and Hot topic an arcade, a cookie company to the right of us and a Barber shop and a Dance studio to the left. The rest of the wing(approximately 30 other storefronts), a family entertainment center, the food court and Sears all closed.
Now fast forward 28 years and we find ourselves in the same Mall that Brian and I started in. With a shop that was starting to suffer because of the state of the Mall and Retail in general.
This is where this lesson about transitioning starts. The first thing you have to do is be willing to recognize that your business has a problem. That is sometimes really hard to do. This can be a really emotional decision. The thoughts that you have failed, the thoughts of “if I close, what will people think?” let alone “what am I going to do for a living?” These are all real emotional thoughts that can make deciding the right thing to do very difficult. The bottom line is….”it’s just business”. Welcome to owning your own business and all the ups and downs that come with it.
In our case we had moved back into this mall 10 years prior when it was one of the most popular malls in the area. In 2013 the Mall was purchased by a company that promised BIG things….they even had a huge public party celebrating the unveiling of their plans with national talent acts performing, guest speakers and news media galore. 6 years later they had done nothing to improve the Mall and by January 2019 had even closed their food court…..things were BAD.
We recognized the problem but we also had a Waterpark location and the events business to help cover any problems that the Mall location may suffer. While the state of the Mall was REALLY BAD….we continued to be the ONLY airbrush studio in the entire Tri-State area. There was no where else people could go to get something airbrushed. So we felt pretty comfortable. We figured since we are the only place they can go…it doesn’t really matter where we are, so take advantage of the low rent the mall started offering and hang around. However, people eventually just stopped coming to that Mall….it was depressing and even scary so we lost foot traffic and therefore were no longer being exposed to new customers. It eventually got to a point where being in that mall was a joke. Our Events business and Waterpark location slowly started helping to pay some of the Mall expenses during really slow times. When it gets to the point where one part of your business model is supporting another part….it’s time to re-think things.
By the end of 2017 we knew we needed to do something…. and so, step number one…
1.) HAVE A PLAN! ….don’t just Close!
Our plan(goal) was to use 2018 to get an online website up and running, work on expanding our Events business and our Waterpark location. In the meantime we would look for an out of the mall ”studio” space and be ready to close when our lease was up in 2019 and open again in the Fall of 2019 after our Summer season at the Waterpark.
Top picture is our Waterpark location in 2018. Bottom Picture is our expanded booth in 2019
At the end of the Summer in 2017 when we closed up our Waterpark location for the season, we immediately started working on our Events business. By the end of the Summer 2018 we had added 3 new Summer festivals to our Summer events schedule and we had made connections with 2 new event planners/agents for getting corporate and private events…as well as continued to have our Waterpark location. We still had to get the website up and running.
Our lease was scheduled to be up at the end of February 2019 so we had to finally make a decision…..do we stay or do we go? While talking with the Mall did nothing except listening to them fill our heads with “There are Great things to Come” …we were not buying it, so we made the hard decision and gave them notice that we would not be renewing our lease after February. For the first two months of 2019 we worked really hard to have the website up and running by the time we closed.
By the end of February the new website was up and running, we had closed the location on February 24th and cleaned out by the end of the month.
28 years of a brick and mortar store had come to an end….at least through the Summer.
The next step was dealing with not having a physical location. Since we had planned to close and we had an entire year to prepare, we learned a few things. Here are a couple more things to keep in mind….
2.) TRY TO KEEP THE SAME PHONE NUMBER. As most brick and mortar stores should….we had a landline. Once we closed we knew we would have the problem of people being able to get ahold of us. The best way would be to keep the same phone number…..but we didn’t have an actual location to transfer the number.
These days it costs very little to add a simple basic phone to an existing cell phone account of which you can use that second phone for business. If you feel you have to have a smart phone for business then get a separate smart phone. You just need to have a separate phone that has your old phone number.
For those with iPhone 10 and above you can have two separate numbers on the same phone. Once you close you can have the landline number "ported over" to an iPhone 10 and still keep the same business number you had in you retail location. With the iPhone 10 it is very handy to only have to carry one phone and when a call comes in there is an “S” for secondary line(business line) and a “P” for Primary line(personal number) this way you can tell if its a customer calling or a personal call and you can therefore answer the phone appropriately.
PLEASE do not just use your regular cell number as your new “business” number…Sorry, but there is nothing more unprofessional than answering a business phone with simply “Hello”. When people call a business they want to know that they are getting an actual business….not the local drug dealer on the corner. And Vise Versa, you want to be able to know its a customer calling or your Mother….lol
Once you decide to close, plan on scheduling the phone number switch a week or so before you actually close just in case there are any problems. We planned to close February 24th and schedule the switch on February 20th. Call your phone carrier and your cell phone carrier and explain to them what you want to do and let them walk you through the process.
Next thing we learned…
3.) GET A P.O. BOX….Do not conduct business out of your home. The P.O. Box should go on everything, your business cards, website, social media. Do not use your Home address. People WILL show up and they WILL knock on your door.
4.) LETTING PEOPLE KNOW YOU ARE CLOSING This can go either way. You can tell people well in advance or not say anything. We opted NOT to announce we were closing until two weeks before. We posted it on Social Media but we also chose not to tell people who came into the store as we didn’t want to have to deal with all the questions. Since we didn’t have a new location we didn’t want to scare people away….nor try to explain to them about ordering online. When we did tell people, we mentioned they can always call us and place the order over the phone and then pickup at our Waterpark location….but this got confusing…lol…
How far in advance to announce you are closing will be a personal choice. Our thinking is if you already have a new location set up then by all means tell people well in advance. If you want to get rid of a bunch of stuff like inventory or fixtures etc… then tell people well in advance. But if its a situation like ours where things are still up in the air…let people find out on their own.
5.) FIND YOURSELF ON THE INTERNET. Go through the internet and find all the listings you can about your business and update the information. For example, do a google search for your business and it should show up on the right side of your screen as a “business listing”. Somewhere on there you should find a link that says something like “feedback” or “suggest an edit” etc… you want to click one of these and follow the steps to edit the address,hours etc… You should have a Google business account/listing which is free and well worth having your business officially listed with the search engines. Most search engines have a section to ”add a business listing” or “verify your listing” so if you haven’t already done this…do it now. As a side note, all the main search engine have a “free basic” listing and of course the link to this is so small that it is hard to find. I wouldn’t recommend clicking any of the “pay” options.
I can tell you that it will take MONTHS to get all of the main internet search results edited…and you will NEVER be able to get all of them. We have come up with some results that have our original address listed from 30 years ago but no way to edit or get it taken down. So be prepared to spend some time over the next few months once you close to find and edit all the search results.
PLAN AHEAD!…every situation is going to be different. We had over a year to get ready. While the final decision only came two months before we closed, we had the whole previous year to plan. Trust me, things would have been frantic had we not planned ahead.
These are a few steps you want to take if you decide it’s time to close your Brick and Mortar store. Quite frankly, this whole 3 part blog will contain information for both people closing as well as for people who are considering opening a location for the first time.
Once we handled all these steps we now needed to figure out how to function without an actual studio location as well as how to operate a custom airbrush online business.
Throughout the Summer of 2019 we added 2 more Church Festivals to our Summer lineup and gained other new corporate events as well as additional small events like birthdays, bar/batmitzvahs etc…
We also operated and expanded the Waterpark location as well as worked all the Church Festivals we could get throughout the area. We stayed busy and continued to learn the online portion of the business. However it was difficult operating without an actual physical location since we have had one for almost 30 years.
You can read about how we delt with the online portion as well as not having a physical location in the other two parts of this 3 part blog
Solving problems of an Online Airbrush Studio.
As always feel free to comment and ask questions.