Boston Designers Open Authentic Arts & Crafts Shop for Visitors

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

Well, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I hope you voted yesterday, at least if you were in the United States exercise your right to democracy. And if you missed it, hopefully you'll get another chance. Now, yesterday was the Get

Out the Vote episode, all about this woman who creates Get Out the Vote postcards and made something like $60,000 in her first year doing it. The day before we had the survival podcast, all about the zombie apocalypse, this guy who's now making multiple six figures producing a podcast all about prepping or preparing for emergencies of all kinds, whether they are those zombies or a geological disaster or the decline of Western civilization, collapse of the financial system, all that good stuff. Today, let's talk about tourism, especially a more intelligent or thoughtful kind of tourism. Now, if you have ever gone to a big city and wanted to bring back some kind of memento or souvenir, you probably found yourself at some point in a store with a lot of mass produced junk. Or if you live in a big city, you probably have seen these stores and you see all the tourists going in there. And this can be discouraging

both to visitors and to residents. Because if you live there, you know that your city has more to offer than whatever cliche it's known for. And there are some tourists who are all about the cliches and that mass produced junk. But hopefully there are also others who are more interested in real history and culture. So today's story is about two friends who happen to be designers, they want to help Boston's artists bring their arts and crafts to the world. So they create a shop to help them showcase their wares connecting them

with the city's millions of visitors. This is a big success that of course, it starts with a side hustle. Stay tuned for that story. Susan Batista and Fritz Kleidke love Boston as much as they love working with each other. They're both senior partners at the creative agency Fritz founded in college, Visual Dialogue.

Over the years, the pair have also started a number of side hustles. It was on a trip to Fritz's native Detroit that they would find their latest big idea. Wandering down the high street, they came across a unique little shop which showcased local artists creations. They had trinkets and t shirts and tasty treats, which really represented the region's history and culture. They felt that their beloved Boston needed a similar type of shop. Every tourist centric shop focused on cliche stuffed lobsters and your usual sports

t shirts. There was nothing that represented and championed the life history, art and culture of this beautiful and historic city. When the pair returned home, they began to look at why a shop like that didn't exist. And it quickly became clear. The cost of rent in Boston's most traffic locations was far too high for local artists to sell their goods, which forced them to sell hours away in suburbs far away from the eyes of most visitors. Susan

and Fritz wanted to create a shop which brought out the best of Boston to those visitors. They would set up a store somewhere with high visibility and enable artists to share their hours. They gave the concept the name 1630 Boston after the year the city was founded. To test their idea, they started with a pop-up shop. They would run it for a weekend in a prime location and see if it gathered interest. If it didn't work, they could walk away knowing

they tried. The first step was finding a property they could use for a short space of time. Originally, they wanted to have their pop-up in Faneuil Hall, which attracts over 20 million visitors a year. They thought it was the perfect place to test the concept, but they couldn't get the attention of the property managers. So, they looked to their client base at Visual Dialogue and approached a different property management company. They were able to land

a weekend-long spot in a location which normally cost $20,000 a month right on Boston's Newbury Street. The official date of the shop was set to five weeks away in November of 2015, which gave them a strict deadline. They had no inventory, no point-of-sale system, no merchandising, and no website. But what is a challenge if not an opportunity? Susan and Fritz weren't afraid to call on their personal and professional networks to help. They knew

it would take a village to get this idea off the ground, especially in such a tight timeframe. They began by asking makers and artists in their network if they had anything they would like to showcase. This helped them quickly fill a large bulk of inventory and ensure they had a wide range of unique Boston-made products. To market the shop, they made use of social media events and press. They set up official events on websites like Eventbrite, and they managed to get the local CBS News station to cover the launch. When the weekend

finally rolled around, the pop-up was a resounding success. Residents and tourists alike were drawn to the shop to see what they were selling. They had an antique bell on their desk, which they rang every time they made a sale, and they found themselves ringing it a lot. That is until someone asked if they could buy it. Everything has a price.

With this initial success, Susan and Fritz knew they had an idea they could move forward with. They also attracted the attention of those property managers from Fanuel Hall when they came into the shop and offered them a more permanent space. They took them up on that and stayed there for 3 years before moving to a new location at a nearby hotel. The process of growing the business from a pop-up into a consistently open store, while doing it as a side hustle, has been a lot of work. They invest much of their time into merchandising, inventory selection, staffing, social media marketing, and pricing their products. There are a lot of hats to wear, but they say the key has been experimenting

and finding what works for their business. Among other things, they host weekly events to attract customers. Artists come to speak about their work, and historians share tales of old Boston, all of which helps to bring new people into the store and engage with what they're creating. So how does the money side work? Well, the startup costs for 1630 Boston were around $25,000. They borrowed this money from their savings, and they reinvested back into the

business. Their profits now average approximately $10,000 a month. Looking to the future, they're now going to build more of an online store presence to increase their reach. They want to make Boston's art, culture, and history available to people all over the world. Well it is no small thing to start a retail shop, especially in a major city like Boston, and operate it for three years while you're also running a design agency, and presumably doing some other stuff on the side. I think these guys should open up a second consultancy

all about time management. But anyway, good for them. And also, good to start with a pop-up shop. That is smart, because obviously they're lowering their risk. If it doesn't work, if there's not the enthusiasm that they hoped for, then they kind of walk away as opposed to spending months and months or perhaps years on this dream to have a retail shop and then having it not work out.

Now also, I thought the key here was leveraging their contacts. You really can't do something like this on your own unless you have a lot more resources than they did. A startup costs like $25,000. That's not a $100 startup. That's significant. But again, to have a retail store

in the city of Boston, $25,000 really isn't a lot of startup costs for that. So their greatest asset was the relationships they had. And I believe, actually, for almost all of us, our greatest asset is connections and perhaps connections of connections. And I often talk about using the skills you already have. Maybe you should also think about the relationships you already have. As you consider what your project is going to be or what your next project

is going to be, whatever that product or service is, when it comes to getting started, when it comes to getting the word out, whether that's building the project in the first place, making the website, whatever it is you need to do, or then marketing the project, maybe getting connected to somebody else. Chances are you know somebody who can help with at least one of those things. And I haven't talked about this recently. I should do a whole episode about it, but I really believe that people like to help. So it's not a bad thing at all to reach out and ask for help, especially when there's a logical reason for it. When

you're not just asking everybody for the same kind of help, but you're going to somebody specifically and saying like, "Hey, I have this thing. And is there any chance that you could help me with this part of it?" Try that some time and you just might be surprised by the answer. Wherever you are, I hope your week is going well. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I love hearing these stories, but I also love hearing about listeners taking action and moving forward on their projects. Today's

show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/676. I'll be back again tomorrow and I hope you will join me. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.