Retailing - NY Times - Making a Store New While Keeping It Old

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New York Times

Monday, May 7, 2006

Emporiums
Making a Store New While Keeping It Old

By NANCY HAGGERTY

KATONAH

WAL-MART'S reputation notwithstanding, the big box hasn't killed the small hardware store. In fact Kelloggs & Lawrence, which has been in business here since 1887, is finding just the opposite: In order to survive in a big-box world, it is all but being forced to grow.

"If we didn't expand, there'd be no hope," said Bart Tyler, who with his wife, Diana, bought the store 10 years ago. Customers nowadays, he added, expect to find both the curious specialty items of high-end catalogs and the multiple product choices of big-box stores. When space to add new merchandise ran out three years ago, Kelloggs & Lawrence's steady annual increase in sales suddenly evaporated.

The remodeling project, which will double the 2,500 square feet of retail space, transforms a multiroom basement storage and office space into a large retail area, moving office space out to an addition in the back.

But heaven forbid that the transformation should make the store look modern. "Modern is vanilla," said Mr. Tyler, who grew up in nearby Bedford Hills.

His assertion demonstrated the paradoxical business model that many small-shop owners heed these days: Customers on the lookout for the latest and best in gadgetry would much rather be looking in an atmosphere of vintage charm.

This is where Kelloggs & Lawrence's age and good bones come in very handy. For one thing, having been around more than a century, it has many antiques now squirreled away in storage — among them a large grinding wheel once used to sharpen knives. Displaying such items throughout the remodeled premises will help the new construction look more old-fashioned, Mr. Tyler said.

There's also the old hardwood floor, which Jeff Kellogg, the store's general manager, remembers his grandfather, Elliott, covering over with linoleum in a 1962 remodeling job. Mr. Kellogg, 50, who swept the store's floors at 12 and began working in it full time in the mid-70's, recalled that his grandfather "thought it was a great improvement to get rid of the squeaky wooden floors," but that "as the years went by, we found out that wasn't the way to go." Several years ago, he and the Tylers pulled up the linoleum.

The store was built in 1895 by his great-grandfather, Henry, to replace the company's original 1887 home — which was condemned along with a group of others to make way for part of New York City's reservoir system.

A store ledger from 1888 lists the sale of an 8-cent hoop, showing that even back then, inventory reflected community demand. Similarly, Mr. Kellogg remembers the store's selling blasting caps and dynamite (the latter kept in a shed in the woods), because local farmers needed them for land clearing.

These days the inventory list carries 15,000 items, said Mrs. Tyler — 80 percent hardware and housewares, 20 percent what she describes as practical gifts and whimsical products.

The couple expect to stock 20 percent more in time for their grand reopening in September. And they hope that event will inaugurate an era of more customers. Right now the average is 250 a day weekdays and 400 a day on Saturday and Sunday — a number that already keeps the Tylers and their 10 full- and part-time workers busy.

Mr. Kellogg marvels at today's sales. Pointing to what he called "fancy mailboxes," he commented, "Never in a million years would I have thought they'd sell — but they do, and on a regular basis."

He emphasized a truism of the business when he said, "People who don't have a clue what they're looking for or where to go, they come to the hardware store." That was certainly the case with one customer whom Mrs. Tyler recalled with bemusement.

She came one spring day a few years ago asking for a very long toolbox. The store stocked 11 varieties, but none of them were just the size the customer needed.

It took some coaxing, but the abashed customer eventually revealed that she needed a container in which to bury the family cat — whose body had been frozen. (Mrs. Tyler eventually found the perfect solution: an under-the-bed plastic storage container.)

As this memory illustrates, the store has a varied clientele. Beyond the more typical crowd of contractors, estate owners and do-it-yourselfers, there is even a man whose house has no running water or electricity and who trades homegrown vegetables for store goods.

Although that customer is the only one who pays by barter, Mr. Tyler said, about 2,000 others have credit accounts with the store. Many of them have "almost a sense of co-ownership," he said. And his wife added that when word of the current renovation got around, "it's astonishing how much people cared.

"They said, 'Don't change your store.' "

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/07wehard.html?pagewanted=print

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