Tuh-MAY-toe, Toe-MAH-toe

I briefly took umbrage a few weeks ago when a reader commented "Based on the posts here at least, [Curio City's] been in a slow death spiral for years". That's true no matter how you slice it. And yet, somehow I still don't think of my store as a failure, maybe because I set such a low bar for success. (Incidentally, I like getting comments, so don't let this anecdote discourage you from sounding off.)

Curio City grew by double digits from 2006 through 2009, when my salary topped out at $16,737 and a year-end profit brought my total compensation to $20k. I wasn't exactly closing in on my ultimate goal of earning $50,000 a year, but things were moving in the right direction. When growth fell to single digits in 2010-11, I chalked it up to the Great Recession. Curio City's first-ever decline in 2012 was only 1.4% -- hardly cause for alarm. Alarm would come with 2013's unexpected 21% drop.

Perhaps I should have seen the handwriting on the wall at that time. Instead, I decided it was a fluke; every business has occasional bad years, right? 2014-15 extended the losing streak to four consecutive years, but those declines were just 1% and 2.2% -- again, not good, but not significant. 

The scales finally fell from my eyes when Christmas 2016 fell a record 24% and left me deeply in debt. A retailer that fails Christmas is a dead retailer. I think my posts this year have been clear-eyed about that.

So yeah, failure. The thing is, I could still turn this around. It would take money -- a lot of money, enough to both get out of debt and renew my product selection -- and effort. Money is always hard for honest people to come by, but not impossible; it's just money, after all. It's my enthusiasm that will never recover. Even if I were to redouble payroll to its former level after my debt is retired, it still wouldn't pay much. Realistically, I'd need at least three successful years just to climb back to the 2009 peak. By then I would have spent 15 years, or a quarter of my life, doing something that doesn't matter and that I no longer care about. I hope to "retire" (i.e., start drawing Social Security, although I'll never stop working) in seven years. I don't want to spend half of those years clawing my way back up to 2009. 

In retrospect, I wish that I'd realized that in 2013. I have a life history of staying in losing situations long after normal people would have cut their losses -- partly because I hate change, and partly because I cling to optimism too long. If I've learned anything by now, it's that when any organization's glory days are gone, they don't come back.  
   
Booming sales this May and June made me second-guess my decision to close. But all of that business came from kites. Those sales are already petering out and they'll be completely over in a few weeks. Everything else I sell is moribund and I have no new product lines to pick up the slack. If I had the stomach to launch an all-out effort, I could probably still turn this Christmas into a winner and restore the ground that I lost last year -- remember that I'm running 15% ahead of LY so far. But my commenter also observed that "your new business pays a lot more with far, far less overhead". That's undeniable. Blue Hills isn't reliable enough to replace Curio City yet, but -- if we continue to avoid the overdue next recession -- I'm confident that it will get there within the next year. I would rather spend my last official working years writing and editing than taking stuff out of big boxes and putting it in small boxes.

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Just for the record...last month did finish as the second-best June ever, and only missed first place by $300. July might have extended the winning streak if I hadn't closed the store for four days. During every vacation I've taken over the past 12 years, I suspended my advertising but kept the store open and monitored business while I was away. Because I only took three days off this year, I actually closed for the first time ever. Statistically, I forfeited $600 worth of business...but since that only would have put $60 in my pocket, it hardly seemed worth intruding on my short getaway. Ignoring Curio City entirely for three days whetted my appetite for the day when I never have to think about it again.

Anyway, this July is indeed running about $600 behind LY, and I don't expect to make up the difference.

If I Could Turn Back Time

I demurred when someone asked a few weeks ago “about things you learned that you didn't expect to learn, mistakes you made, and what you would do differently (or what you did right and wouldn't change!).” Today I’ll take a stab at it.

When Curio City was still on the drawing board back in 2005, I figured it needed to gross $175,000 in annual sales to generate an annual salary of $35,000, which is half of what I earned in my heyday. I figured it would take five years to get there. My bricks-and-mortar store would deliver 75% of the revenue with the website picking up the rest (about $44,000).

The store never came to pass, of course. The website should make something close to $70,000 this year, and if the economy ever turns around, I could hit $100,000 by 2020. That’s a lot of money for an old man selling stuff out of his cellar, but it still leaves me solidly below the poverty line.

What happened?

Most obviously, the Great Recession happened. I thought that Americans would always spend money that they don’t have to buy things they don’t need for people who don’t want them. It seemed like Ronald Reagan’s new Age of Greed would roll on forever. Will those high-flying days ever return or are we back to the more modest lifestyles of the 1970s and earlier? Hard to say. Economists think that we might return to historic norms by 2016, but I don’t expect to see boom times again during my remaining years in harness.

But blaming the economy only goes so far. Americans are still as materialistic as ever, even if they lack the means to indulge themselves like they used to. The rich are richer than ever, the middle class is treading water, and the poor…well, nobody cares about them. Maybe the go-go years are gone, but people are adapting to this new normalcy.

I blame three things for my failure: Marketing, technology, and poverty.

I don’t like self-promotion or have even the slightest interest in it, so it’s no wonder that I suck at marketing. I had thought that I’d be able to farm it out to consultants. But marketing professionals earn big salaries that price them out of my reach. So I’m left to thrash about on my own.

I don’t understand the appeal of social networking at all; my Facebook page is somnolent and I don’t even try to use Twitter. When every other entity in the world is putting itself forward to the point of saturation, such reticence is deadly. My email newsletter is so ineffective that I am tempted to close my Constant Contact account to save $18 a month – the newsletter doesn’t even drive the $180 in sales that would justify that expense. I keep it going mostly because I understand it and I’m fairly good at it (my open/click statistics always beat the industry average).

I was interested in technology back when I used to go out into the world. I even had a short career in software development. But I dropped the tech ball after leaving the workforce. I almost got a smart phone this year out of professional necessity, but my wife decided that she needed one, too, and we can't afford two data plans. The choice was easy since she actually wanted one and I did not, but it probably doomed Curio City to ever-decreasing relevance. The appeal of tablet computers also mystifies me. The incessant parade of new i-Thisses and e-Thats is boring. Technologically, I am stuck in 2005.

That might not matter so much if I could reach enough curmudgeons like myself; we Boomers still command the economy. That’s where poverty comes in. I would like to spend $500 a month on Ess-Eee-Oh for six or more months to dramatically boost my organic search results (unpaid clicks). I need to overhaul my website’s design. And I need to refresh my product line, writing off a lot of old dead items and bringing in some new lines. It would take between $5,000 and $10,000 to accomplish all of that. But I constantly struggle just to cover monthly operating expenses.

What would I do differently if I could start over? I might spend the $28,500 that I invested in Curio City on education instead. I could’ve bought a degree in, say, accounting. It’s not that I yearn to be somebody’s employee again – the “being your own boss” thing has forever spoiled me for wage slavery -- but sometimes I wish that I could just mindlessly punch a clock and earn enough money to survive on. After all, it’s not like Curio City fulfills my boyhood dream of taking things out of big boxes and putting them in little boxes. I don’t make the world a better place, or get much personal fulfillment, or make much money. Yet that’s how I spend my days.

No, that’s a copout. If I had it to do over, I would take one of these two paths:

1. Find a partner whose skills complement my own and who would contribute some startup cash and be a co-owner. That would yield a better capitalized startup, compensate for my personal weaknesses, and force me to work harder when my self-motivation flags. I considered doing that. But I’m a loner and I didn’t want to give up half of my business, I didn’t want anybody second-guessing me, and I didn’t know anybody who would have been interested, anyway. If I could reset the clock, I would try harder to find somebody who fits that bill.

Or:

2. Find a line of business that interests me personally. I enjoy the managerial aspects and creative control of running a business. But I’m neither a consumer nor a capitalist. I chose retail because I’d done it before and because it was easy, not because of any desire to sell things. I didn’t know in 2005 what else I could do, and I still don’t know today. I’m not passionate about anything. So…why not retail? It’s no better or worse than anything else I might do. If I could reset the clock, I would look harder for some type of business that might suit my personality better.

I’m an old man selling stuff out of his cellar with no visible path forward and 15 more years until I can max out my Social Security checks. Yet, rather than give in to despair, I cling to the hope that if I keep plodding along and making those incremental changes that I can understand and afford, I can still kick this thing up to a higher level. After all, the web store is beating my original forecast for it. Curio City has generated more than $60,000 in paychecks and repaid more than $13,000 of my original $28,500 loan. If it's not been a big success, neither is it a failure.

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An interesting “new” scam crossed my desk. Although it’s new to me, it’s so obvious that I can’t believe I never encountered it before. In this active version of domain-name squatting, somebody pays the usual $8 to register a domain name similar to yours (in this case, “curiocitiesonline.com”), then emails you to say that it’s being auctioned off with a minimum bid of $69. What do you want to bet that if I had bid $69, fake competitors would’ve jacked up the price? And if I fell for that once, how long do you suppose it would be before the scammer registered and “auctioned” another variation on my name? 

Very clever, legal, and I’ll wager that the sleazebag (recordio.net) earns a lot more money than I do from my legitimate business. Maybe I should’ve become a scam artist.

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There will be no posts for the next two Fridays due to my annual vacation. You might want to read this one three times.

Happy Birthday to Me, Part 2

Curio City recorded its first sale one year ago this weekend, on November 19, 2005. I held a stress-test party that night. Those who could come in person had a drink or two and some snacks, and shopped from the several computers we set up around the house. Those who couldn’t be here logged in from their own home. My friends and family bought about $850 worth of stuff that night.

Then, nothing happened for weeks as I sat back and waited for the search engines to index my pages and send the masses my way. Finally I bumbled into pay-per-click advertising the second week in December, and managed to pull off one decent week just before Christmas. That makes last year’s sales laughably easy to beat; in fact, Curio City really didn’t ramp up until Valentines Day.

In the past year, I learned (which is to say, "taught myself") how to set up a new business, how to run a website, how the gift business differs from the book business, and how online retailing differs from running a store. That's a lot of progress in one year. I feel like I have the foundations in place now.

My goals for Year Two are more modest: I will double Year One’s sales, I will record a profit for 2007 as a whole, and I will take out as much in salary as I invest as startup money. In other words, Curio City has to break even in 2007 after taking a substantial loss in 2006.

My next post will use Year One’s actual sales numbers to extrapolate what success looks like.

Other Forthcoming Topics:

• What Does Success Look Like?
• Possible Futures
• Credit Card Processing
• Planned features

Money Doesn't Grow on Trees

If you’ve plowed through my past posts, you’ve heard about startup phases and my attitude toward debt. Most readers must wonder where I got the money to finance this approach – unless you’re my in-laws, who just assume that I stole it.

I am not a rich man, nor do I want to be. I scraped along for many years in subsistence-level jobs. I’m content with just enough money to comfortably pay my bills with a little bit left for modest luxuries. A couple of computer games per year, a nice vacation every couple of years, decent gifts for my wife and friends, the occasional computer replacement…that’s plenty for me.

In 1996, I left retail (which pays squat) for a tech job during the boom. My starting salary as a game tester was a small pay cut from being a book buyer, but by 1999, thanks to royalties and promotions, I had nearly tripled my income. Meanwhile, my needs and wants remained unchanged.

The PC game business is brutal. Burnout is common and employers are notoriously mercenary, trimming staff every time a product ships. I always expected that I – with no technical skills or education -- would eventually quit or be laid off.

So I saved a lot of money. I am a lousy consumer. I much prefer having money in the bank to buying things. I called it my Unemployment Fund.

In 2000, with my employer obviously failing, I angled for the generous severance package that came with the first round of layoffs. Combined with my savings, and large enough unemployment checks to cover my bills, I’d never been so rich in my life.

Fast forward: Further career crises unfolded as my money gradually dwindled. Then my mother died, and I inherited another year’s salary. This, I knew, would be the last time in my life that I would ever have a lump of money at my disposal. Now my slow-motion career crisis intersected with the resources and motivation to change it. With the generous support of my wife, I finally gave up on game development entirely, and Kraken Enterprises was born.

So here’s how you start a business without going into debt:

1. Reduce your needs and wants to subsistence level.
2. Earn considerably more than that, and save the difference.
3. Marry a woman who will cover your personal living expenses while you pour your assets into the business.
4. (Inheriting more money is optional, but recommended.)

It’s as easy as that!

If Curio City Online turns a profit in 2007, as it must, my current deprivation will have been worth it. If not, it was a terribly costly detour. I’ll have spent my life’s savings and walked around penniless for two years for no good reason. But at least I have a shot at the brass ring, and that’s more than most people ever get.

Other Forthcoming Topics:

• Long-term Prospects
• Planned features
• O, Canada
• Giving 110%
• Credit Card processing fees

Lights...Camera...(Cue Chirping Crickets)

November 2005 got pretty crazy. Merchandise started flooding in; I spent many hours photographing it, writing descriptions, and moving it into our cellar. My target opening date, Nov. 7, came and went. Eric (the web developer) was silent; I wasn’t even sure he was working on Curio City at all. When the next Monday, which was my drop-dead date, also slid by, I began to panic in my low-key way.

Finally, Eric broke silence to reveal a nearly-completed website. (It had taken him 99 hours to reach that point, btw). I recruited all of my friends and relatives to stress-test the site on Monday, Nov. 21. I got 13 orders that night totaling over $800, as well as lots of valuable feedback. The prevailing opinion said I didn’t have enough merchandise, so I redoubled my ordering despite having spent my whole pre-opening budget.

That’s when the crickets started chirping.

I’d thought that search engine results would bring at least a little traffic my way, but day after day went by without any sales. I didn’t appreciate, yet, how hard it would be to make my site come up in keyword searches – a challenge that I still haven’t solved.

I sent an e-mail blast to everyone that I knew, and got one more order out of it. I found a site (Addynamix) that let me create a cheesy banner ad and run it for $99. Some software glitch prevented my banner from running for nearly a week. As of Dec. 4, I still had no business at all. I started reading up on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but I was paralyzed into inaction by the complexity and anticipated cost.

At about this time, my sister approached us, in need of some money. She’s at least as web-savvy as I am, so I drafted her to get a handle on PPC advertising for me. That worked out. It was an expensive learning experience, and the clicks were costing me dearly, but I did finally start getting some sales. I had only the most rudimentary traffic information from Navigator’s Webalyzer program. When I complained to Rip, he set me up for AwStats. At last, I was seeing some solid information about my visitors. Alas, AwStats contained a security weakness that allowed someone to attack Navigator’s server; Rip withdrew the tool after only three days. I was back to working in the dark.

Then, on Christmas Eve, the server went down entirely. I had been disappointed with its uptime so far, and this holiday crash was the last straw. With Eric’s help, I moved to MochaHost by Dec. 31. I'm still there. Rip graciously still gives the Kraken Enterprises homepage free hosting at Navigator.

My first Christmas brought in about $1,800 in sales. This December, I will more than double that amount.

Next: Fast Forward to Today

If You Build It, Will They Come?

I’ve never had to do much marketing for the various businesses I’ve run, which is good. I don’t particularly like it and I’m not very good at it. I knew, of course, that Curio City would not have an employee whom I could christen “marketing manager”. I hoped that I could spend a few thousand bucks on an ad blitz to get the ball rolling, and then search engines and repeat sales (plus some routine advertising) would be my lifeblood. I was budgeting 2.5% of my gross sales for advertising.

It turned out that professional marketing, like web development, is a lot more expensive than I had dreamed. A serious effort would cost more than my entire startup budget. I needed to cut some corners.

One of Anne's former coworkers had just started her own PR firm. She might, we thought, be hungry for business. I took her out to Legal Seafood in Framingham for lunch, and pitched Curio City to her (I didn’t yet have a website to show). She took some notes, asked some questions, and said she’d bring us a proposal. We emphasized that we were willing to do some grunt work ourselves to keep the cost down.

With Anne and I doing virtually all of the production work, and an assistant handling our project on their end, her bargain-basement fee would be $6,500. Plus expenses. Hah! My budget was $2,500, so we really didn’t have anything further to talk about.

I trolled Craigslist a few times, hoping for a freelance marketing type…a student, maybe. I just wanted to pay someone $500 to deploy the other $2,000 to maximum effect. I found no takers. So, as opening day approached, I had nothing in place.

The second leg of my plan was search engine results. Getting one’s site or merchandise to come up organically in real Google or Yahoo searches turns out to be quite an art. There are companies called SEOs – search engine optimization firms – that promise to do this for you, usually by shady and secret methods. Their typical fee is in the $6,000+ range and theirs is a buyer-beware industry. Reading up on it myself is difficult, because everything assumes that you have an HTML site and know how to maintain it; once again, the PHP engine gets in my way.

Just a few days ago, a caller showed me how to run my URL through W3C Validator, which appears to be an online HTML error checker. It found 49 errors that, according to this salesman, prevent the engines from indexing my pages. I have no idea whether that is serious, or just a sales pitch. I need someone’s help. Eric is unavailable for the time being.

This kind of thing is exactly why I started this blog. I am hoping that someone who’s already solved this problem will read it, and leave a comment. I am also hoping that it will not provoke a flurry of SEO sales calls.

As for repeat sales…my original, ambitious site design was meant to make Curio City a “sticky” destination that people would visit for fun and for community as well as for shopping. Nothing like that was implemented. I have made 341 sales to date. Exactly ONE was a repeat customer who wasn’t a friend or relative. I really expected more like 1 in 10 would come back. I still hope to see a few of them again when Christmas season starts up; even 1 in 100 would be nice! I’ve been sending out newsletters with discount offers, to hundreds of people every month. Each newsletter brings me 0-1 sales.

I ship quickly, I address complaints promptly. Only about one sale in 20 encounters any problem that I know of. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my site, my service, or my merchandise. There’s just no particular reason for anyone to come back. I’ve thought about posting a survey or questionnaire…but again, because of the PHP, I need a developer to do that for me. I have so many higher priorities on my list.

The answer to the title question is, unsurprisingly, No. They will not come just because you built it.

Next: Here They Come

Web Development Begins

By September 2005, I’d built up a good head of steam. I opened a checking account. I trashed out, cleaned, and organized part of our cellar, and started looking for merchandise. I opened a PayPal account. I arranged for web hosting with Navigator Hosting, a small business owned by one of the Octopus Overlords, and the host of that site. I went with Navigator partly to support somebody I know, and partly because I was impressed with Octopus Overlords’ uptime during Hurricane Katrina (Navigator is in Louisiana). And I worked intensively to finish my website spec.

I quickly realized how little I know about two important things: internet technology, and marketing.

Fortunately, the developers that Michelle had recommended (Eric and Polly) explained things as we went along. My computer gaming career gave me considerable experience with software development, but the online environment was all new to me. While Polly (the artist) and I hashed out the look of the site and the logo, Eric (the programmer) explained such arcana as merchant accounts and gateways. He also floated the idea of buying a PHP shopping cart to drastically reduce development costs.

Buying a software package that already included all the basic e-commerce functionality, rather than having it coded from scratch, looked like a very good idea. Eric would customize the basic cart to achieve my spec. He suggested a few possibilities, and I eventually settled on Sunshop, mainly because I liked its interface and support forums.

I have questioned this decision numerous times, and am still ambivalent. Sunshop itself is fine, as far as PHP carts go. But Curio City Online does not exist as a set of static HTML pages. Rather, Sunshop builds pages from templates as they are called up. Without knowledge of PHP programming, I am more dependent on developer support than I would like to be. I’m perpetually unsure what can and cannot be easily implemented. It’s difficult to optimize for search engines – a problem that still plagues me today. All of the help resources I've found are specific to HTML pages.

This might be tolerable if I had my developer’s undivided attention. I do not. Eric puts in time as he can, and progress comes very, very slowly (he does have a day job, after all).

Incidentally, Turnkey is working on a major version upgrade to Sunshop. It will theoretically be ready next month, and the degree to which it solves some shortcomings will greatly affect my opinion of it. That's fodder for a future post.

Once Eric installed Sunshop at Navigator, I pressed him to tackle my many customizations. He convinced me that we really needed to concentrate on just getting the doors open. Reluctantly, I dropped or postponed one planned feature after another. It was hard to watch my vision of a unique, exciting web shopping concept gradually give way to a plain-vanilla online store, just like every other. But October was slipping away already. I wanted to open before Thanksgiving, and we hadn’t even nailed the look yet. The bells and whistles would obviously have to wait. Just getting the basic site up and tested was pretty intense.

Long story short: We did get it done in time for a stress test the weekend before Thanksgiving. It passed. Curio City Online 1.0 was real, and in time for the heart of the Christmas season.

Eric has slowly been plucking away at my task list ever since, most recently completing some support for Google Analytics. I do have a clear plan. First, I want Eric to handle about 10 more tasks that I consider part of Curio City 1.1. I had hoped that he would finish them before Sunshop 4.0 comes out. Then, I want him to perform the upgrade. After that, I can finally set the poor man free, and go into Christmas 2006 with version 1.1. After the holidays, I'll find a new developer to implement the core customizations that comprise Curio City 2.0. Three developers read my spec; one expressed weak interest in taking it on. It is amazing how hard it is to find someone for this without paying big bucks to a big company.

All of this tech stuff gave me an excuse to put off my other major challenge: marketing. I have never liked or cared about marketing. I don’t know anything about it. I’ve never had to deal with it myself before. But it is critical. Curio City will rise or fall based on marketing. I have known this from the beginning. I have also known that I am inadequate for that challenge. I need help.

Next: If You Build It, Will They Come?

Nailing the Concept

My concept for Curio City was twofold.

First, I would sell "everything else", meaning anything that isn’t owned by Wal-mart, or by some trendy mall boutique chain, or by an Internet category-killer like Amazon.com. I would sell an odd assortment of quality merchandise. As I mentioned last time, my earliest model was a store in Williamstown called Where Did You Get That?! They sell curios, novelties, toys, games – all manner of unusual and fun merchandise. It’s the kind of store where you never know what you’ll find around the next corner, and that is the feeling I want to create at Curio City. But WDYGT was crowded, and full of low-quality, low-priced crap for children. I started thinking about taking their same concept upscale, in the kind of shopping environment that would appeal to me.

Besides “everything else”, my other main concept is “everyone else”. That is, my customers will be people like myself (except with money!) who need to buy gifts but hate to shop. I will offer an assortment of high-quality merchandise at reasonable prices, with no tasteless trash to wade through. I’ll offer original greeting cards. I’ll offer gift-wrapping on the spot. The idea is to be a painless, one-stop destination for people who need to get gifts but aren’t inclined to shop around for them. “Gifts to go” is my catch phrase for this concept.

Armed now with a goal, I started kicking around some names, relying on a thread in my favorite Internet forum, Octopus Overlords. I polled these names: Everything Else, The Worthwhile Shop, WorthWhile, And Another Thing, and The Odd Store. “Curio City” was eventually suggested by user Pyperkub.

Anne and I took a couple of road trips, scoping out different types of gift shops in resort towns and tourist areas. Each one helped me refine my ideas about merchandise and presentation. A local chain with the awful name Funusual does something near the concept that I was settling on. They do it in malls, though, where I don’t want to go. And the last time I looked, they had no Web presence worth speaking of.

In late July 2005 we had dinner with our old friend Michelle Chambers, who owns a web design firm called New Tilt. I picked her brain about business in general and Web business in particular. Based on that conversation, and on a suggestion from Anne, I decided to open Curio City as an e-commerce site ASAP, and postpone a physical store until Fall 2006. I was dismayed to learn how much professional web designers earn. Michelle says the rock-bottom charge is $7,000. I reluctantly raised my budget from $2,000. I began to hope that the Web business might work out well enough to preclude opening a real store. I’m skeptical, but I’m open to the possibility.

Once this decision was made, things happened rapidly. I opened a mailbox at the UPS store to obtain a business address: 300 Grove St., Suite 113. I got a cell phone so that I could have a business phone number: 781-635-8743. I met with my patent attorney friend Dale Malone in an official capacity for the first time, buying him dinner at The Union Street Brewhouse in exchange for his advice on incorporating.

I got my federal EIN, and incorporated as an S Corporation on Dale’s advice. Then I trademarked the name Curio City. Sadly, that URL was taken, so I bought curiocityonline instead, and made a point of referring to my store by its full name in all references.

By late August 2005, I was finishing up a highly detailed website spec and looking for a developer. I had extremely ambitious plans to create Curio City as a place – a destination as much as a store, with a strong community aspect. It would have been like no other store on the Net. The first developer I interviewed turned down the job as unworkable. The second one agreed to do it, and for the very good rate of $35 per hour. Thus began a long struggle that continues to this day.

NEXT: Web development

Kraken Enterprises begins

The older I get, the harder it is to pretend that I work for any reason other than to get a paycheck. Yet, to succeed in a job, you have to act like the paycheck is incidental. You have to pretend that you care so much about the work that you’d rather be in the office than anywhere else. The people who pull off that charade (or, even scarier, the ones who actually buy into it) are the ones who get ahead.

I’ve never cared much about making money for other people, and somewhere along the line I lost the ability to pretend otherwise. This attitude probably makes me unemployable. Being nearly 50, white, and male does not help very much, and my checkered work history and rudimentary education pretty much seal the deal. Who would hire me?

The combination of inheriting a bit of money, feeling unemployable, and being unable to retire, led inevitably to one conclusion: I have to work for myself.

I was slow to accept that idea – it wasn’t easy to give up the pursuit of a regular paycheck, especially since I didn't feel driven to do anything in particular. As I was grappling with that, I decided to spend a few thousand dollars on one last exotic vacation. We arranged to meet up with some Michigan friends in Tortola, BVI. One fine afternoon in the swimming pool at Lambert Beach, I went into my employment lament, which had begun to bore even me after my third layoff. My friends suggested that I might start some kind of gaming website. I couldn’t imagine how that could possibly make money, especially with PC gaming on the wane, and strategy gaming never particularly popular, and me having no real technical skills. I shot the idea down…but it was the first time someone suggested a website.

Gradually, I concluded that I should open a store. But what to sell? The two things that I know best – books and computer games – have died in retail. The Internet and two huge chains own bookselling. PC gaming is steadily losing market share to consoles (I have zero interest in action-oriented console games). Besides, like books, that business is owned by the Internet and by huge chain retailers. It is simply not possible to establish a profitable general-interest bookstore or PC game store.

So…what retail category is not thoroughly dominated by (a) Internet retailers, (b) big-box stores, or (c) a mall boutique chain?

First, I investigated hobby shops. There are still a fair number of mom-and-pop retailers, despite worrisome growth by a chain called Hobby Town. As my continuing research suggested that a hobby shop might be feasible, I had to admit that not actually having a hobby of my own (except, that is, for PC gaming) would be a real handicap. Successful independent hobby shops are labors of love by fanatical hobbyists.

My other inspiration was a store in Williamstown, Mass., called Where Did You Get That? This dimly-lit, claustrophobic store was overstuffed with all kinds of novelties, gag gifts, games, nostalgia items, costumes, toys, and miscellany. You didn’t know what you’d find around the next corner, but it would probably be interesting. This store’s eclectic selection and haphazard presentation was its strength. It was actually fun to shop. Here was a concept that depended on its owner’s quirks. It could not be made formulaic and reproduced. As far as I knew, there were no similar shops locally.

I wanted to avoid a label like “hobby shop” or “bookstore” that would create expectations that constrain my selection. “Gift shop” seemed sufficiently vague to encompass almost anything. I would open a “gift shop” similar to Where Did You Get That. I would eliminate the cheap, tacky, lowbrow humor items and tilt more toward the techie and the sophisticated. I would also have a nice website, and make a significant share of my sales online.

(Ironically, the original Where Did You Get That store has moved to a larger, brightly-lit location. Their selection and presentation are more professional now, and they’ve lost the quirky fun feeling that originally inspired me. Let that be a cautionary tale.)

I researched Boston-area competitors. I took a few classes on how to found a company, choose retail space, etc. The price of rent in any desirable shopping areas was very discouraging. I honestly don’t understand how any independent store can ever cover its rent and payroll, never mind putting money in its owner’s pocket. I started running numbers. They were pretty daunting. It was very clear that my little inheritance was not going to do it. I’d have to take on considerable debt. Debt = danger. I really wanted to bootstrap my business.

About this time my wife suggested that, instead of starting a store with a website as an afterthought, I could start with the website, and use the knowledge and experience gained to open a store. Maybe the web would even prove profitable enough that I wouldn’t need a store at all. Oh, and by the way, she would support me while I got the thing off the ground.

That was the breakthrough. I could bootstrap this thing. I could establish the business, find vendors, test merchandise, and build a brand – all without taking on debt or risking anything beyond my starting capital.

On August 12, 2005, Kraken Enterprises, Inc. was born, and I was committed. ("Kraken", by the way, is a long-time gaming alias assembled from the letters in my name.)

NEXT: Curio City takes shape

The Mayor's Background, Part 2

One Saturday night in December 1995, my wife and I were shopping for computer games as Christmas gifts. The PC game industry was still robust then, and the aisle was brimming with new games. I was moping about my inability to escape from the MoS into publishing. I commented to Anne that what I really needed to do was get a job playing computer games.

The next day’s classifieds included a small ad headlined “Make a Living Playing Computer Games”. Sierra On-Line, one of the major publishers, was hiring game testers. That was as clear a sign as I’ve ever seen. I applied the next day, despite Anne’s caution that the career potential was equivalent to stuffing envelopes at home. Impressions Games hired me before the week was out, and I started my new career in January 1996, at age 39.

It was a good move. I had no formal training in computers. I was still using a 486 running MS-DOS, having turned up my nose at Windows 3.x. With this new career facing me, I immediately bought a Pentium 120 with Windows 95 and taught myself to use it. I would remain behind the tech curve for the next several years.

The PC game industry turned out to be lucrative and challenging. I worked as a tester, lead tester, writer, associate producer, and finally producer, and then later on as a writer again. We mostly made historical strategy games aimed at brainy adults – exactly the kind of games I like to play. My salary soon caught up and surpassed my meager bookselling income; with bonuses, I nearly tripled my income.

You’d think that the game industry would be a lot of fun. It was not. It was a sweatshop. The hours were grueling and the burnout rate was high, due in small part to bad management, and in larger part to the computer industry’s feudal structure. As proud as I was of our finished products, the process of making them was highly unpleasant. Although Impressions was successful, the corporate masters (Sierra and its owners) were not, and they put the squeeze on us. It became obvious that the company was doomed by corporate incompetence. So it was with great relief that I took a layoff with generous severance in early 2002. I’d never been laid off from a job before, but it seemed to be all the rage in 2002.

Thus began a period of instability. My erratic work life featured more layoffs and failed companies and bouts of unemployment between 2002 and 2005. It didn’t take long to exhaust the very limited PC game employment options in New England. The unstable PC game industry did not inspire sufficient confidence to move elsewhere to take a job. And so I found myself once again contemplating a career change.

I’d been doing a bit of freelance writing and editing, so that was my focus. It gradually became apparent that a white male of my age would never break into publishing without either considerably more education or an inside line on a job. I was unenthusiastic about it anyway. In fact, I really wasn’t much interested in returning to office work at all.

Then my mother died. I inherited some money. Not a lot, but enough to change the direction of my life.

Next: Curio City is born

The Mayor's background, Part 1

Let's start at the beginning: What led me to start Kraken Enterprises?

Like most Baby Boomers, I started out with a pretty normal work life. I had a long series of meaningless jobs in my teens and early 20s, worked my way through college, and finally graduated with a useless Bachelors degree in English. Not wanting to teach, I ended up working in the back room of a B Dalton bookstore in Lansing, Michigan. It was supposed to be my day job while I became a novelist in my free time.

Heh.

Working with books suited me. Soon enough, my tendency to run things overcame my habitual inertia, and I moved up the short management chain. It wasn't long before I was managing my own B Dalton in Horseheads, New York. It was a comfortable job. The pay met my needs, and the opportunities for advancement matched my limited ambition.

After six years, B Dalton became a takeover target, and I decided to move on. I wound up managing the Lauriat's bookstore at South Shore Plaza in Braintree, Massachusetts. This job theoretically should have been great, but instead it turned rapidly dreadful. Lauriat's was a dysfunctional company that would die within a few years.

I ended that unhappy stint quickly, landing a job as the book buyer at Boston's Museum of Science. The MoS was expanding, and I'd been hired to transform their sleepy little children's book department into a full-fledged science and nature bookstore. The pay was terrible, but the hours were short and the work was fulfilling. Under director Roger Nichols, the MoS was on a major roll, and the staff felt like we were part of something important -- bringing science education to a public that desperately needed it. I was proud of my store. For the first time in my working life, I felt like my work mattered.

Unexpectedly, Roger Nichols died in his prime, and the spirit of the place slowly ebbed under the directionless and reluctant interim director. I hung on, remembering the glory days and hoping for their return. When they finally brought in one David Ellis, we hoped that the old spirit would return.

That did not happen. Ellis inherited an institution that had overexpanded and taken on too much debt. His priorities were necessarily increasing revenue and cutting costs. To accomplish the former, he ditched the adult-oriented approach that had brought us such great exhibits on Rameses the Great, China, India, and Soviet Space. The new focus was on children's shows and pop culture tie-ins. To accomplish the latter, he slashed staff. The MoS had always been an academic environment in which jobs were thought to be highly secure. The massacre came as a huge shock. IIRC, he laid off about 20% of the staff.

Apart from destroying morale and crushing our vision, the effect on me was financial. Previously, my bookstore had been seen almost as a public service. Without rent or taxes to pay, and with salaries low, I had been free to carry many low-markup, academic-type books that you wouldn't find in a typical commercial bookstore. These texts made my store fun to browse, set it apart from its competitors, and gave it a certain gravitas. Chet Raymo called it "a community treasure" in his column. Books might carry the lowest margins, but they gave our store a serious educational feel despite all the high-turnover childrens crap that we sold.

No more. Now the pressure was on to improve turn and margins. Even at their best, books could never rival apparel and toys for markup. Gradually, I lost physical space and budget. As much as I loved the institution and was proud of working there, the handwriting was on the wall. I had to move on.

In the 10 years that I'd been insulated from the larger bookselling industry, some serious changes had taken place. First came the rise of Barnes & Noble and its clone, Borders. With their deep pockets and relentless discounting, these book superstores made it impossible for small, independent, general-interest bookstores to compete -- remember, markup was already notoriously low -- and the industry was in a sad period of dramatic decline. This was also about the time (1996) that Amazon.com took bookselling online, stealing away the independents' last competitive advantage -- their special order services and eclectic selections. It was clear that I could not go back to what I'd done before unless I wanted to join the evil empire (Borg & Noble). I made a serious effort to break into book publishing as an editor or a publicity person. But the publishing industry was also in consolidation and I had no education or experience. That went nowhere.

NEXT: Where I ended up