Small Business Saturday shoppers at the Made in Queens shop. / Source: QEDC
This year I created a small boutique retail pop-up project that aims to help local makers sell their goods out of a retail storefront. The idea came together rather fast thanks to the Queens Economic Development Corporation. I had many discussions with Seth Bornstein, executive director of QEDC, about the various iterations of a small shop and how to make it viable. We launched the Made in Queens (MiQ) shop that sells goods manufactured locally in the borough of Queens as well as New York State. The shop opened on June 7th however, as a true pop-up, it will close on December 30, 2016. Over the course of these seven months we will have hired approximately 10 part time staff and local consultants.
American Express is the founder of Small Business Saturday and in conjunction with Federal, State and local government, they advertise Small Business Saturday on various national and local communication channels. In addition to this, they provide a training workshop for Community Champions to orchestrate the micro-local Small Business Saturday event. In our case, the Long Island City Partnership was our "Community Champion." The local entity has been our influencer; they have encouraged local stakeholders to embrace the Made in Queens pop up store into the local micro-community. By building local partnerships with realtors like Gotham Realty, sponsors like Capital One Bank, and pop up consultant Miles.City, we opened the Made in Queens store on Queens Plaza South, a main artery that is the landing ramp of the Queens Borough Bridge, with traffic coming from Manhattan.
We met with the Long Island City Partnership one month before Small Business Saturday to discuss a cohesive strategy for this one day of shopping -- and incorporated our unique tactics to encourage shopping. At MiQ, we displayed all of the Small Business Saturday flair distributed by the Long Island City Partnership. This included a door mat, window posters, triangular flags and with each purchase we gave out the sought after #shopsmall branded tote bags. As a promotion, we offered a 50% off of our tee shirts with an in store purchase. One of our local food makers, Andrea Patel of sweetcicles volunteered to be in store and offer tastings of her locally manufactured, natural candy chews to in store shoppers.
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Lessons Learned From This Year, For Next Year
Looking back at Small Business Saturday 2016, for best practices to incorporate next year, I would say that as a community-based storefront, we benefitted the most by meeting with our community influencers and stakeholders ahead of time to strategize on making the most out of this one day. We agreed to engage in active email marketing, social media marketing and word of mouth publicity for this annual event. We discussed creating value for shoppers by offering them a map of stores participating in small business Saturday.
Small Business Saturday with the Queens Economic Development Council / Source: QEDC
We also offered a promotion to those shoppers who purchased at three or more stores. We pointed them to neighboring stores on their way out and invited them to sign onto our mailing list to invite them back for other in store community-based events after Small Business Saturday, which we do year-round.
Concluding, creating a conscious economy can be condensed into one word: community. Business owners and shoppers alike should participate in your local plazas, shopping corridors, merchant associations, business improvement districts throughout the year, these organizations have the same theme as small business Saturdays, to foster many micro local fabrics of community with conscious shoppers supporting the #shopsmall movement and if you participate all year round, your Small Business Saturday will undoubtedly be a success.
What This Means For Job Creation
Small Business Saturday is also an ideal time to engage conscious shoppers as well as the local workforce. Here's why.
I recently read a research paper made public by the Center for an Urban Future entitled “SCALEUP NEW YORK, Creating Middle Class Jobs by Growing New York City’s SmallBusinesses”. In this research report the trend on job creation is expressed by the size of the companies in New York City. Since 2008, the number of newly added jobs to the job market has been incremented by those companies with less than 10 employees. In sum, the report states that small companies add more jobs each year than medium companies and companies with more than 1000 employees are seeing a decrease in job creation.
In a vacuum this report leads one to conclude that small businesses are creating lots of jobs, which is great, however lots of subsequent questions arise, such as, how many of these jobs are retained each quarter or year? Asking this leads me to question sustainability. How many of the jobs created by small businesses are retained over time by these small businesses?
Building Constructive Economies
If Disruptive Economies means centralizing profits for scalable companies where the fee structure trickles upward to the parent company while creating scarce earning opportunities to the front line labor force, then let’s call small businesses with roots in local communities, loyalty to their workforce, constructive economies. With respect to Small Business Saturdays, we would say that the small businesses participating are more involved in their local communities and have more loyalty to their workforce. The questions we need to ask ourselves here is how do we build such small companies?
