With the roughened hands of a craftsman, manipulating wood with honed tools and glue, Mark Dawson, owner of Cocoon Home Design, has built every part of his business but the front door.
It, and the building it fronts, he chose eight years ago when he took out a lease on the shop about six blocks away from what is now the Olympic Village. Even then he knew the location posed some hurdles.
“Some marketing [was] needed because there was limited foot traffic,” he said. “But one thing I underestimated was the difficulty in [employing] the strategy needed.”
He tried a conventional approach, taking out advertisements in local publications and doing direct mailouts. He quickly discovered their ineffectiveness.
“If I could go back with that knowledge, I probably would have selected a different space,” he said. “It’s definitely more of a challenge than I had thought it would be.”
He was initially attracted by the industrial area’s lower rent prices, but without the kind of foot traffic found on thoroughfares such as Broadway or West 4th Avenue, any walking wallets whose patronage might be seduced by the art of masterful carpentry have been sparse, and business, though steady, has remained slow.
Yet the location isn’t wholly without countervailing virtue. It’s allowed Dawson to retain that which would otherwise be missing had he chosen a store on one of the majors.
“My workshop is on site,” he explained. “It’s a beautiful space, with vaulted ceilings, big beams, open spaces.”
In fact, his most useful advertising tool is the frequency with which people tell their friends about the old-world intimacy of the space.
“People like the showroom; they’re talking to the guy with the sawdust on him who’s actually building [the products],” said Dawson.
The word-of-mouth advertising has helped build his reputation to a point where most of his business comes from designers, referrals and repeat customers.
Now, with its many new residents and alluring pathways, the east end of False Creek is starting to bustle, and the near-deserted sidewalk outside Dawson’s studio may soon convey shoppers in greater numbers.
Numbers aren’t a problem for Rachel Sawatzky, owner of CocoaNymph Chocolates and Confections. She’s had trouble meeting demand for her sweets at her Point Grey shop. “Once we started wholesaling, we had to turn people away.”
She believes the success of her business on Vancouver’s west side can be attributed in part to the closure of two similar businesses that had been doing well. One of them never recovered from a fire, and the owner of the second decided to leave retail sales in pursuit of other ventures.
Knowing the specific market climate of the neighbourhood, she suggested, can play a key role in the ultimate success or failure of a retail location.
Yet the difficulties posed by the layout of her store set limitations on her ability to grow.
“I have space that I’ve paid for but can’t use,” she said, referring to space she calls “funky”: a nook under a stairwell and two concrete wheelchair ramps that consume 60 square feet of prime chocolate-eating real estate.
To remedy the problem, she opened a second store farther east, equipped it with a bigger kitchen and stopped saying no to clients.
In choosing the location, she had some help from a customer: an architect with a sweet tooth.
“Looking for a building when it’s not your area of expertise can be pretty overwhelming,” she said, “so having someone help who considered the space very carefully was definitely an asset to the process.”
The new location, at the corner of 7th Avenue and Ontario Street, had important qualities the first did not.
“This place was the right size,” said Sawatzky. “We can definitely take advantage of the traffic in the neighbourhood. It’s on a very busy corner, and it’s at the intersection of two bike routes on two streets that people [use to access] Broadway and Main streets.”
Sawatzky is confident that the shop, which has a large wall visible from the street, will be easy to see. “Once we put our signage up it will essentially be a billboard where hundreds and hundreds of cars drive by every day.”
Her advice in deciding where to set up shop is as simple as her chocolates are sweet.
“Plan [for your] needs, and make sure that the space meets them as closely as possible.”
