Owning a business in Logan as non-LDS (Cache: fit in, transplants)

[Aerorick]

Oh Brother, I can't hold back on this one. But it is from a first hand and very expensive experiance. On one extreme, if your business is of the nature of say, selling wetsuits on the Titanic you'll do fine. But if your going to compete with LDS owned businesses and your not one of them, good luck. Our business failed not from trying, not from not having the finest retail establishment of any kind in Cedar City, not from offering very contempoary, very family friendly, and very reasonably priced beautiful products. But, and I was told this from several prominant natives from the city too late, because we were a couple from California and not LDS. We opened an art gallery featuring custom framed landscape and wildlife art from noted artists. It was a sister gallery to one in California that does well. And that one is located in the mountains miles from populated areas. But then the clues came. We had local women come in and when asked what we could do for them said," Oh nothing, I'm just making sure this place was decent for the children". We had a travel agency down the hall that augueably catered only to locals. Think about that, it makes sense. We saw people day in and day out walk by our huge picture windows and make a deliberate effort not to look in. One guy walked into the wall. We finally slashed prices hoping that was the problem because we refused to believe the obvious. We had full-page feature stories in the two local papers and paid $2,800 in advertising for months. Nothing helped. It defied every law of business. And I'm telling anyone who is thinking of the same thing what I wish I knew in the first place. Do not brush away any concern about the power of rumor, falsehoods and the exclusionality that runs rampant in some areas of Utah lightly. It's changing but depending on where your at you could be giving those wetsuits away and still have no takers. If I sound emotional and serious about this it's because I am. And I can back up everything I've said. DO YOUR HOMEWORK!

[Aerorick]

I feel so passionate about this that I want to add a couple more facts. For the last two months of the seven we were open we dropped our prices on American made, custom wood-framed, one of a kind, award-winning images to Wal-mart prices. They weren't even very expensive in the first place. We couldn't do any more to the stores appearance. The folks that came in often thought it was an art museum. The building owners even gave us free rent. Either out of guilt or they were as dumb-founded as us. We bought a full-page ad. What happened? Nothing.
What did we learn? Well Utah physically is a great place. But if you try to enter the domain of the one thing that is kept completely under the control of the powers of the state and your not one of them, prepare to get hammered. Am I cynical? Yeah, about $11,000 worth.

[coolcats]

I dunno. It may have been discrimination, but as an LDS person, I have no idea who owns the businesses I frequent. Granted, I don’t live in a small town so that might make a difference. But Cedar City is a medium-size town of 30,000, so it’s doubtful that all LDS people could keep track of all other LDS or non-members (contrary to what you may think, there is no organized effort to track those things on a wide-scale basis). If your shop was in a town of 1,000, that might be different.

In fact, from what I read, that area of Southern Utah is a 60-40 split, so at most your failure could only be blamed 60 percent on the LDS and would have to be blamed 40 percent on the non-LDS. From what I’ve seen, art shops do well in tourist districts, and cater to well-to-do out-of-towners (think of Jackson WY). But I’m not sure Cedar City is really a top market for custom art. It’s an area of depressed wages. Not a lot of tourists visit Cedar City itself, except during the few weeks of the Shakespearean festival. Let’s do a little math (note all of these are my rough educated guesses):

Cedar City’s population = 30,000
Average household side = 5 (higher than the national average)
Local households in target market = 6,000
Average household income (based on $20/hr) = $41,600
Average Disposable Income (after 25% taxes, LDS tithing 10% for 50% of the population, $300 health care, $1,000 mortgage, $1,000 food, gas, & necessities ) = $1260/year = $105/month.

Obviously individual circumstances will vary, but you can see from the math above, that a family that has a disposable monthly income of a $100, $200, or even $300 isn’t going to have a ton of money to buy art.

So you are fighting for market share among a stagnant pool of 6,000 low-income customers, plus several thousand during the Shakespearian festival in the late summer and fall. Now think of Jackson Wy. It’s a very wealthy area that area gets thousands of vacationers every week, for a constantly refreshed pool of potential buyers, plus locals who are much more well-to-do. Both of these demographics are probably more likely to spend disposable income on art than your average struggling family in Southern Utah.

In short, if I were going to attract customers, I probably wouldn’t focus so much on the local market. You would be pulling from the lower income stagnant customer base that would be saturated quickly. I would do something to attract people passing through. That way you would get a constantly renewed customer-base. But again, location, location, location would be the key to finding an area with transient people willing and able to buy custom art.

I say the above not to denigrate your experience, but when I’m emotionally invested in something it is often harder to look at things from a more analytic point of view. I’m not sure you’ve looked at the entire root cause, is what I’m trying to say.

[Aerorick]

Coolcats, I appriciate your input. And you are correct on many points. We also considered all of what you point out and more before we spent a dime. Yes, the local market was somewhat weak but we targeted the homeowners in a 30 mile radias, not just the city dwellers. The demographics of income were actually very favorable immediately outside the city. Any income from the Festival would have been marginal as travelers weren't likely to want to transport a 24 x 36 inch box involving glass very far in their cars. And dispite Cedar City's promotion of Art Gallery's as a feature of the city, see Cedar City website, there were actually only three, ours being one of them. One drawback was we needed people to come in to see for themselves. A classic business challenge that we met with copious advertising. The title "art gallery" conjures up lots of images. But did not carry ceramic candy dishes or over-priced oil paintings from someone you never heard of. Our images were recognisable to anyone and the aveage price for a 36 x 28 wood-framed museum quality image for example was $220. They were all one of a kind, some award-winning and exclusive to us.
Believe me Coolcats, I wish to God it was only the things you mentioned that were hindering success. Those are normal challenges to any new business that can be seen and felt. And they can be dealt with. That's half the fun of it. But man, when you can't see it you can't do anything about it.

[Aerorick]

I thought, to end my input here, I'd point out one unique aspect of the culture here that we didn't figure on. Typically from the experiances of the "sister" gallery it was known that approximatly 80% of the purchases there are made by females. They are the more often than not the ones who spend on things for the home. Unfortuneatly, we found that at least in Cedar City, even if the disposable income was available, the majority of the females didn't have the authority to spend it independently.

[mcsotan]

You are very wrong about women not having the authority to spend independently. Just head up to Swiss Days in Midway on Labor day weekend and observe the pile of purchases the women make (very few men will go near that craft/art event). They can hardly get them back to their cars while pushing a stroller full of screaming babies. I can assure you their husbands didn't pre-approve everything they bought!! Here's a secret you may have missed before open ing your business. LDS women (the primary decorators of their homes) like to have exactly what their neighbor has. The art you were selling may have been too unique for the general tastes of Cedar City. Sorry to say, it probably just wasn't the latest decorating thing among the flock. LDS women often adopt a sheep mentality without even noticing it. I bet your wares would have sold better in Salt Lake City where there is more diversity. I don't say this to put LDS women down. I'm one of them. But it is a quirky thing about us. We've become pretty homogenous in our tastes- in Utah anyway.

[Aerorick]

mcsotan, there is no doubt we would have done better in SLC or St. George in a much more diverse population. But it's been closed for awhile now and we've moved on to other things. Would love to hear from anyone reading these posts who visited the store when it was open. It was called City Gallery in Cedar.

[debbee]

Originally Posted by Aerorick

mcsotan, there is no doubt we would have done better in SLC or St. George in a much more diverse population. But it's been closed for awhile now and we've moved on to other things. Would love to hear from anyone reading these posts who visited the store when it was open. It was called City Gallery in Cedar.

Aerorick,
Did you ever consider selling your products in Springdale before opening shop in Cedar? You proabably would have had a better target audience to sell to although you would probably have also encountered tremendous competition
with the landscape wildlife art.
Like you stated above I think it depends on the type of business opened in Utah. I had considered opening a business but then decided against it for some of the same reasons. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

BTW love that kind of art gallery but we never get up into Cedar often so we missed out.

[Aerorick]

Debbie, It's a classic case of ,"If I'd only known". We actually had no compitition at all with what we offered. I can only say that your "paranoia" might be justified. Like I said, if your not a "native" and your not selling wetsuits on the Titanic, be very careful.

[Aerorick]

I might add to the post about local women not being able to make purchases. The example given was "a pile of purchases". I'm very sorry you never saw the store. We didn't have a pile of crafts and arts that people do for a hobby and hope to sell to make a dime on the dollar they spent. If they had a fifty dollar budget they could fill their cars with it. And unfortuneatly we found that if it ain't at Wal-Mart you don't need it. And to deal with that, cause' we didn't care at that point, we lowered our prices to Wal-Mart China made, mass-produced crap just to see for sure if what we were told was right. And that was for two months and $800 worth of advertising. And you know what happened? Our traffic slowed to a stop. We finally gulped our ignorance of "reality" and closed.