Brent Weiss makes a habit of strolling through shopping malls for ideas of what not to do with his Uncle Dan’s outdoor specialty stores.
Chain stores with an identical look from one location to the next are a turn-off, he said. So are sales clerks who spend more time chatting with one another than striking up conversations with customers. Then there are crazy store policies that discourage sales, like a senior discount that cannot be used if the shopper is accompanied by a non-senior who helps choose what to buy.
“Why don’t they just say, ‘Don’t come in and spend money,'” said Weiss, co-owner with his father, Alvin Weiss, of Uncle Dan’s, a 35-year-old Chicago-area retailer with more than $7 million in annual revenue.
In an age of cookie-cutter stores, Uncle Dan’s dares to be different. Weiss strives for a distinct feel at his four locations and tries to match the personality of each store with the neighborhood it serves. At his Lakeview location on North Southport Avenue, which opened in November, shelves are stocked with plenty of kids’ wear and dogs are welcome. The heavy concentration of students in Evanston calls for more backpacks, Weiss said.
The company’s newest, 7,000-square-foot Highland Park location, scheduled to open this month, may be the best example yet of the contrast between Weiss’ old-fashioned retail values, culled from his boyhood experiences helping out at his great-uncle Dan’s Army-Navy Surplus store, and the increasing homogeneity of mass retail, he said.
When Uncle Dan’s outgrew its existing Highland Park location, the company took over a former Gap on a prominent corner in downtown Highland Park, spending more than $150,000 to erase its “sterile look” of white walls and laminate pillars, Weiss said. In their place came authentic barn-wood beams and hardwood floors for an outdoorsy feel.”We don’t want to be a big box. It’s so important that you walk in and feel you’re in a mom-and-pop,” said Diane Weiss, Brent’s wife and a vice president of the chain.
Keeping that homespun charm as Uncle Dan’s expands to more locations could be a challenge, experts said. Brent Weiss is putting in place systems that would make future expansion easier and has turned to consultant Michael Kramer, president of Skokie-based WinBig.org, for help building a strong foundation for growth.
“It is forcing us to examine areas of our business that we never had before,” Weiss said.
Still, standardizing the business without killing creativity is a concern. “We don’t want to lose what we have,” Diane Weiss said.
Chain retailers often give up individuality as they find a tried-and-true model to expand. “They become more and more operationally excellent internally so they can deliver the best price,” said Paula Rosenblum, vice president of research and content at Boston-based Retail Systems Alert Group, a research consultancy.
However, the big-box approach has a downside, she said. “You lose the intimacy and sense of relationship you had as a small retailer,” she said. “Customers have noticed. They’ve noticed that self-checkout isn’t a proxy for service.”
A common criticism of big-box retailers is too much focus on efficiencies and not enough on customer service, said Anne Brouwer, senior partner at Chicago-based McMillan/Doolittle LLP, retail consultants. “Truly great retailers have the right balance of art and science,” she said.
Finding that happy medium often is no easy feat, particularly for small-business owners, whose talents generally fall in one area or the other, not both. Weiss is a creative type, who built his business by getting to know his customers well and relying on gut instinct. When an Uncle Dan’s in a Buffalo Grove strip mall failed, he learned to stick with neighborhood locations. He decided to open an Evanston store in 1994, after a drive through town revealed backpack-toting students wearing the outdoor apparel labels he carried.
“I thought, ‘These are our customers. We should be there,’
” Weiss said.
Weiss’ customer focus is clearly a competitive advantage, Brouwer said. “One of the key opportunities that smaller retailers have against their bigger competitors is their ability to customize and personalize that relationship with their customers,” Brouwer said.
“As you get too big, you have to appeal to more people to generate more business so you’re profitable,” she said. What often gets watered down in the process is the merchant’s voice and point of view, she added.
At the same time, standardizing operations becomes more important as retailers expand, Rosenblum said. “You can grow more as a result, and use your time to do more intelligent things and less grunt work,” she said.
For Uncle Dan’s, it means fewer errors. Switching to color-coded transfer tags means merchandise moving from one store to another is more likely to get to the right place, he said. A checklist of opening and closing procedures has brought a cleaner store that is easier to shop.
By standardizing some business features across stores, owners have more free time to work on the important aspects of the business, such as strategy, Kramer said. “It’s not going to stop creativity. It’s going to make creativity be possible by freeing people from the constant problems, frustrations and the inability to get things done,” he said.
Already, Uncle Dan’s stores have less chaos than they used to, Brent Weiss said. Ultimately, that should allow Weiss and his employees to spend more time with customers. “The best part of my job is being on the selling floor. It’s fun; it’s instant feedback,” Weiss said. “But to grow the business, I had to take a step back.”
