They lacked a business plan, site review or financial feasibility study.
What Ron and Ruth Carter did have, however, was a wealth of kitsch accumulated at flea market and garage sales, along with an ideal locale to peddle the stuff.
Gifts and Decorations requires no introduction to anyone who has driven along North Kingshighway near Delmar Boulevard.
It’s tough to miss the queen-sized Notorious B.I.G. bedspread or the array of themed rugs and wall motifs adorning the storefront where Kingshighway meets Vernon Avenue.
A sidewalk inventory sheltered only by an awning did not occur by happenstance.
“We pretty much have to put everything outside,” Ron Carter explains. “Nobody will know if we’re here if we sit inside eating jelly donuts. There’s not a lot of windows here.”
Statistics tracking the longevity of small businesses can be confusing.
A 2010 United Capital Funding study that drew on several sources, including data from the U.S. Census, Commerce Department and Small Business Administration is probably closest to the mark. It calculates that the small business survival rate is 49 percent for five years, 34 percent for ten years and only 26 percent for ten years or more.
How, then, to explain the staying power of Gifts and Decorations? This year, the Carters will commemorate a quarter century of selling DVDs, CDs, scarves, ponytail bungees, socks, dirty magazines, mass-produced art and rugs, including one with the indelible image of the late reggae icon Bob Marley toking a joint.
Carter, 61, gives a simple answer: “It’s not just caring about what you sell. It’s how you treat people, too.”
Gifts and Decorations traces its roots to a spot a few blocks east and south, along Lindell Boulevard. There, Carter — then an elementary school arts teacher — sold handcrafted ashtrays, statuary and figurines molded from plaster of Paris in the early 1980s.
The figurine and ashtray market proved to be fairly successful.
But as the collection of knick-knacks picked up at the flea markets, and other sales approached critical mass, the Carters decided to broaden their inventory.
When the couple – married 35 years – set up shop on Kingshighway in November 1987, the stretch included a beauty shop, a barber shop, a repair shop, a Chop Suey joint and a bar.
The Carters gradually took over the neighboring real estate as each of the businesses dropped away. Eventually, Gifts and Decorations occupied the entire building.
But only for the purpose of storage. For rare is the customer that makes it past the entrance of 1158 North Kingshighway.
Peddler such impulse buys on the sidewalk is “a lot easier than trying to get them through the door,” Carter says.
Outdoor merchandising captures the peripheral vision of the driving public payday loan no faxing. That’s key to attracting passerby shoppers like Helen King, who pulled curbside after spotting a framed Last Supper triptych, in which artist Wolfgang Otto cast people of color as Christ and his disciples.
“Ten dollars,” King said, loading the print into her car. “You can’t beat it.”
Rotating or rearranging the inventory on a daily basis is another marketing trick. Close observers of Carter’s downmarket bazaar will notice the Betty Boop bedspread, for example, rarely hangs in the same spot.
“That’s another secret,” said Carter. “Don’t put (stuff) in the same place everyday.”
Of course, there’s a downside to conducting business in the great out-of-doors.
Winter isn’t the problem.
“Snow is not so bad, it comes down slow and you can get the stuff inside,” said Carter.
It’s the other seasons, with the storms that tend to descend on St. Louis out of nowhere, that pose the biggest threat.
It takes the Carters about an hour each morning to wheel out the smaller inventory and clamp the rugs and bedspreads to the clothesline running the length of the building.
Carter has never put it to a stopwatch. But he assures it takes a lot less time to get the merchandise inside when high winds and thunderbolts erupt without warning.
Carter says business has dropped off since a city health inspector two years ago ordered Gifts and Decorations to halt the sale of frozen ice – which the Carters call “snow balls.”
“Everybody liked our snowballs, because we gave them a lot of juice,” he said. “And when people stopped for a snowball, there was no telling what else they’d buy.”
Carter is keenly aware that sidewalk transactions, even after 25 years, doesn’t fit the traditional business model.
But he points out that Gifts and Decorations is as vulnerable to the market and economic forces as the grocer across the street or the auto parts supplier on the next block.
Besides taking a hit in the recession, Gifts and Decorations is engaged in constant give and take with wholesalers over the cost of the Chinese goods that dominate the inventory. And the Carters grind their teeth over the bane of businesses of every shape and size – taxes.
Ron Carter may complain that “I don’t know if I’ll be in business that much longer if they keep raising my taxes.”
Still, the couple allows that a healthy supply of merchandise is stockpiled beyond those doors that his customers never enter.
And nearly 25 years after they first arrived at the corner of North Kingshighway and Vernon, they have no plans to clear the sidewalk anytime soon.
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