Design tips and disasters, part one (the shopowner's home)

Pomegranate customers often ask us what our own house looks like, assuming, maybe, that we get to take home whatever we want (and that our house looks like a showplace). Theoretically, that could be true. But it doesn't always work that way. In fact, sometimes it looks like a warehouse. Thought I'd share some of the good and the bad here. Maybe a little series!

First, let me say that I love our house. Except for the #]&^! teeny closet of a laundry room, our house is lovely, and perfectly suited for us. Oh, there are things that really bug me that we'll deal with someday, like the vestiges of Builder's Delight Brass Fixtures. When were these things ever in style, and how did they worm their insidious way back into our homes (weren't they banned as eye pollution in the 70s)?

We have a brass and glass hanging pendant light in our entryway that is so flippin' ugly that I'd like to shoot it. If I had a weapon. Fortunately, it's way high up in the air, we never turn it on, and no one ever sees it, so it's on the bottom of the "to do" list. Plus getting up there requires a very, very tall ladder. It's not going to be easy. Meanwhile, here's a picture of a shiny brass towel rack in our master bath that has no business being on earth. Not only is it brass, but totally useless. It's located in this trapped space behind the giant tub (which I don't like either), and no human could ever reach a towel hanging there, unless you catapulted yourself into that deep space behind the useless tub. Why don't I take it off the wall? Because it will leave holes and unpainted spots, necessitating a paint job, also somewhere down near the bottom of the list. Why don't I just put a towel on it and pretend like it's useful? I don't know. The towel will just get dusty and I can't reach it unless I fling myself across the back of the tub.

For the record, I also detest the tile border, sort of a quasi-southwest desert sand abomination. I bet there's a lot of that here in Bend: somebody had a trainload of it and sold it to every builder in town. Fortunately, it's limited to just a few small spots in the house, and I will someday take great pleasure in ripping it out. Hopefully not just before we start thinking about selling the house. That's a mistake so many people make: you live with something for years, decide to sell, then make those upgrades you know you should have done years earlier. Why not do it now and enjoy the changes? This falls into the "do as I say, not do as I do" category.

My only other lament (the last one I'll share anyway so this doesn't seem too whiny) is white tile countertops in the kitchen. Granted, it's better than the cheapy blue laminate in our last kitchen, but white tile with white grout in a kitchen is just bad news. Unless you don't cook.

Back to the idea of taking home what we want. I cannot, in good conscience, complain one little bit about comfort and decorative objects and nice surroundings: we have all that. But there is sometimes a small case of the cobbler's children having no shoes. Or Family Hold Back. We often take home the poor waifs that get broken, that no one wants, because they're scratched or damaged or otherwise unsellable. If I want a new candle at home, I'll take the one that someone took out of the box and dropped. Or a tester. Dishes? A mishmash of colors that didn't sell so well, so we took home the leftovers. It's a nice mishmash – I do like them – but not my heart's desire. I think this is true of many retailers: it's really not about denying things for yourself, but more about wanting every bit of merchandise on the shelves for customers. I figure if something sells well and we place reorders for it, then eventually I will have earned the right to take one home. Why, yes, I DO want several new Maruca handbags, one in every new color, but that would just be so wrong. Somebody slap me before I do it!

My true, awful nature is that I would love to flip and change and move things and bring in new things all the time. I am the shopping monkey, afterall. But like everybody else, we've got a slim budget to stick to, and really, our shop is the priority. If there's any money available, we need to sink it into more inventory, not a linen slipcovered sofa (sigh).

Well, I didn't give you any tips this time (except for the notion that you should fix up what you can early in the game, and not a month before you sell your house). But stay tuned. There's so much more to talk about...

The anxiety dreams of retailers

Our life is rather predictable right now (work, work work); even our dreams relate directly to the shop. Robert was tortured last night by a two-part Pomegranate dream. First, he went upstairs to our little kid's area, and found himself knee-deep in thousands of large puzzle pieces. Someone had unwrapped every single puzzle (strangely, we don't have any right now, but I've got a shipment coming that he doesn't even know about!) and thrown all the pieces everywhere. Little Mermaid mixed with Peter Pan mixed with geography pieces. It would takes hours and hours (maybe days) to put it all together again. Anyone who's ever worked at a clothing store has dreams about piles of mixed-up T-shirts that must be folded before closing time -- it's all part of the same anxiety/dread retailers have.

In the next dream sequence he had to deal with an irate customer who had picked up our sewing machine cover and wanted to buy it as a cat cover. She had her cat with her, and kept showing him how nicely the cat fit inside the cover, and demanded to buy it. "But I can't sell that!" he said. "My wife would kill me; it's the cover for the sewing machine!"

"But I WANT it," she insisted. I think it ended badly, with her slamming the cover down on the counter and storming out with Fluffy in her arms.

Heh: maybe that's a good idea for a new product. Cat Covers. What do you think?

Where do you get your music?

One of our little categories/offerings at the shop is music. Old-school, plastic-wrapped cds that come with cover art and sometimes lyrics inside. The ones you can hold in your hands and study. The ones that have irritating sticky strips that take five minutes to remove.

It's kind of a dying vehicle, those factory-fresh cds. There are so many online, downloadable options now, not to mention the totally illegal practice of burning cds for friends. We love music (love!), and will continue to search it out and offer what we think is noteworthy. And we thank that loyal group of customers who like what we like and buy much of their music from us.

But here's the thing: the time spent sourcing/vetting new music is a wee bit excessive (but I'm a night owl and don't get paid by the hour, so who cares?), and the wholesale prices we pay are high. Very high. On top of that, some of the more esoteric and interesting artists are not readily available from the distributors. Like everyone else trying to stay alive today, distribution houses are focusing on mainstream offerings -- the stuff that sells.

I guess I'm in a bit of a funk about it. It started a few days ago with the release of the new Pink Martini album. Big fans, we are (although we don't love everything they do). I had the release date on the calendar, to be sure to have the cds in stock. Then I listened to it, or snippets anyway. Eh. Some really, really good songs interspersed with a couple of clunkers (four clunkers, to be exact). Perhaps we're too critical, but when you play the album in a store, you don't want to listen to anything that's too weird or bad or frantic or irritating. Or off pitch. It puts shoppers in the wrong frame of mind. We only play cds that we have for sale; that way, you get to walk around listening to it before you buy it. So it has to be good all the way through.

I also noted on the calendar that a new Jack Johnson cd was being released on the same day. Yay! Oh. It's a live album of everything you've heard before, only with clapping and woo-hooing.

The same day, we saw Sting on The Today Show performing a piece from his new winter/christmas album, If on a Winter's Night. Okay, that's good... like it. It only got 1.5 stars on the general review-o-meter, maybe because some were hoping for the "old" Sting of Roxanne style. This is way more contemplative and soft. English madrigals and ancient folk songs. I thought I detected a whiff of Fairport Convention in there. It's a christmas album, and I'd rather listen to that than most of the hokey christmas fare out there. If you really want to torture me (and possibly inflict permanent damage), put me in a locked room with that god awful new Bob Dylan christmas album, Christmas in the Heart. Oi! I think he should be forced to do about 1,000 Hail Marys for that one... and go apologize to the Wailing Wall.

Back to Sting. The new album is interesting enough that I went to my wholesale ordering site to check it out. Wholesale price is $11.99, with a suggested retail of $16.98. Let me tell you that that's not a very good margin, given that we usually try to lower the suggested retail. And that we have to pay 50¢ to $1 per cd for shipping, depending on how many we buy. And that we have to buy a play copy if we hope to sell any of them. I did the math: we buy five copies at $11.99 + $5 shipping + one play copy @ $11.99. Total: $76.94. We sell five copies at $15.95 for a total of $79.75. That leetle margin is a sneeze towards covering all the expenses a retail store has, not to mention two people working full speed ahead, and those voraciously hungry birds that can go through a bag of seed in a few days...

But here's the real kicker, math and margins aside. You can buy this particular album at a certain big box for $9.99. Yes, less than we pay wholesale. So what do I do? Nix a good album just because big retailers are willing to lose money on it and pay you to come buy it from them (in the hopes that you'll buy something else that actually has a profit margin)? Years ago I was a rep for a distribution company that sold to chain drug stores. The stores would buy Clorox bleach from us for maybe 89¢ per unit and sell it for 92¢. That was a loss leader. The teeny margin didn't add to the store's health, but it got people in the door. This new strategy from the big boxes, buying books for $20 and selling them for $10, why that's just genius!

Now don't go thinking of me as all bitter and grumpy. We're going to keep looking for and bringing in music. A house without music is like a house without books -- unthinkable! We'll do the best we can to find interesting albums we think you'll like. You'll always be able to come in and listen and get recommendations. For the rest of it, for stuff we can't get (or imports that are truly, ridiculously expensive), I'll occasionally post some links for laudable offerings from iTunes. I think it's a great resource, even though I'd rather be selling some of this stuff from our store.

Back to our subject line: where do you get your music? How do you choose what you want and where do you find it? When do you listen to it? What kinds of music do you like?

Okay: here's a little prize for getting to the bottom of this rant. Here are a few of my obscure favorites you can find on iTunes.

Gretchen Parlato: get her self-titled album. We can order her second album (In a Dream) but don't like it nearly as much as the first! Great Brazilian tunes, and a few in English. Sort of a soft, bossa nova/jazz theme all the way through, but not boring. You could play it during any dinner party, and everybody would be happy.

Francoise Hardy, Clair Obscur. Hardy is a famous French pop icon from the 60s and 70s and I find a lot of her stuff to be kind of fizzy and well, pop. But I love this album, and we used to sell it in the store, but because it is one of those dang imports, it retailed for about $22 (and we paid $19.95 for it!). You can get it for $9.99 on iTunes. Speaking of pop, one of my favorite songs on the album (this one belongs at the end of a romantic movie!!) is I'll Be Seeing You, a kind of funky rendition sung with -- don't gag now -- Iggy Pop. Uh, not normally my favorite guy. Iggy Pop, like rum & coke, only remind me of some really bad dates in my youth. Icky.

Last (not least... have to save some for another post), check out this guy named Vinx. Who is he? A revelation (to me; maybe he's well-known?). He's classified under R&B/Soul, but he really defies classification. Love his album, The Mood I'm In. There's this rolling, sweet beat all the way through. Little reminders of Bobby McFerrin, sometimes. An afro/caribbean/brazil percussion section. And a great voice. If nothing else, buy the song You Are My Sunshine. It's got to be the best version ever, with its West African beat, or wait, is that a slow-burning samba section?

Let us know how you like these!

Weird stuff (previously) for sale

Once in a while we'll find an oddity to bring into the store. It's usually just for laughs, but sometimes someone buys our oddballs. We always like to have at least one "what the heck is that?" kind of item in the shop. Thought I'd share a few here (even though they're long gone).

They may not look strange, but the metal words "Bend" and "Fun" above have an interesting origin. Years ago, we bought some old signs that had come from the Bend Funeral Home. Clever husband that he is, Robert got out the hacksaw and turned these into several smaller vintage signs that said: "Bend," "Fun," and "Home." We threw out the "eral" part (although we could have made "era" out of it. Dang.).

They sold within a day, although I managed to snag these two for us. From slightly creepy to cool!

On an antiquing road trip a while back, we came across a set of walking canes, the tops of which were outfitted with a salt and pepper shaker. Now go figure! It made us laugh, so we bought them, thinking they might be in the shop forever. But they sold, too. We had a lot of fun speculating on how they came to be. Somebody's hare-brained idea ("We can sell a million of these at the county fair!")? An eighth-grade shop experiment? A Swiss walking/picnic stick? Just think, if you were picnicking, you could reach across several people to sprinkle some pepper on the deviled eggs. How convenient.

I had a personal collection of tiny porcelain doll parts: heads, arms, legs, headless torsos. I'm not much into dolls (was I the only little girl on the block who didn't have a Barbie, and not care?), but these bits and pieces were so charming in their strange way. Alas, I can't keep everything, so we put them in the shop as a kind of oddity. They were all gone within the week. But here's my most excellent idea for the person who got all the parts (or for those of you who hunt for odd things like that): for Halloween, make simple cupcakes and stick a vertical doll leg or arm in the frosted top of each one. Chic creepy, non?

What kind of weird things (we're talking inanimate objects here) do you have in your house?

What's in a (store) name?

A few weeks ago, a news article caught my attention: Donald Fisher, founder of The Gap stores, had died. Long ago, I worked for The Gap for a briefish stint, trying to save up enough to finish my last year of college (I learned a lot at The Gap, too; definitely part of my education). So I knew the origin of the company's name, and certainly knew the company ad jingle, a catchy bit that still sometimes replays itself in my head, ad nauseum (if you're more than, oh, about 30 years old, you know "Fall in-to-the-Gap..."). I had even shopped at the original store as a teenager. It was odd (in that "I knew them when!" way) to see this one, simple idea grow into a mega-chain.

Interesting to note that Mr. Fisher originally planned to call the store "Pants and Discs" with a subtitle of "Levis, Records & Tapes." [Ahhh, 1969. How quaint.] His wife, Doris, came up with the far better name "The Gap." Do you think the store would have become the powerhouse it is with a name like Pants and Discs? No possible way. Forty years later, The Gap has stood the test of time, and is ingrained in our brand consciousness. Whether or not you shop there, you know exactly what it is.

On the other hand, we get used to every oddball name that thrives or goes mainstream. Kinko's was named for the wild, kinky hair of its founder. I bet he did it as a lark, never imagining that it would grow into a national chain. Never imagining that some of us would call it Stinko's.

One of my favorite stores (other than my own, oh yeah) is called Tail of the Yak (Berkeley, CA). There's just so much wrong with that name, starting with "yak." But mention the name to anyone who's ever shopped there, and it doesn't matter. Your heart still skips a beat and you get this warm fuzzy feeling about the Yak. Or how about Bell'Occhio (in SF), another fabulous, inspiring, beautiful shop? Unless you're Italian, you probably can't say it or spell it (and good luck finding it, too). But, it doesn't matter. They went with a name they loved (it means "good eye" in Italian), and bucked all odds to become one of the most luscious (and loved) little boutiques anywhere. You mustn't miss it if you go to San Francisco, but you better do a google map search first, because I'm not kidding: you'll never find it otherwise.

Then there's our own little Pomegranate. When we took over the location nearly twelve years ago, it was called Ice House Trading Post. Well, I'm just not a trading post kind of girl, so that had to go, and even though "Ice House" has a connection to the property (Bend's oldest ice house is one of our three buildings... but no ice anymore), it had its own issues. Although we relied on our small but growing group of sweet, dear and wonderful customers to know what we were all about, the words "Trading Post" and "Ice House" led some people to think we had pemmican and stuffed squirrels and cheap beer. The phone rang all day with such inquiries. Not exactly what I had in mind.

So the search was on for a new name. We had pages and pages and pages of names we had brainstormed. It had to be just right. Not a name someone else already had (I love "Nest" in San Francisco, but it's really bad form and bad business to copy a name, even from a different state). It has to be memorable, spellable, and most of all, fit your image. It has to sound good (or at least, not sound weird) when you answer the phone with it. If you call for Directory Assistance (or google a name search), can you at least get the first four letters right? [That's one small reason why I hate names like Kountry Kollections – oh, don't get me started!] And, does it work graphically when you start thinking about logos or labeling?

As we were in the throes of picking our new name, we ended up taking a long road trip, entertaining each other with stupid name ideas, and pretending we were answering the shop phone ("HellOOoo, Poopsie's!" – that was Robert's idea, shouted out in a high falsetto). My mother was with us for part of the way. She came up with Pomegranate, and it fit. She has wild pomegranate trees on her property, and we were always filling the car with them for decoration at the shop and at home. At the time, pomegranates were still an unusual and exotic fruit. Way before the time when they became part of our diet and vernacular. Before they became part of our cocktails. Pomegranates connect us to the Mediterranean, which we love. And they are ripe (pardon the pun) with spiritual, mythical, and religious iconography, which we learned about later.

Not that Pomegranate is the perfect name. It has its problems. Spelling, for one. We get mail addressed to Pompgranite, Pomogranit, Pamagrante, and every other possible variation. It's also a long name; the whole logo process is challenging (like right now, I'm finally putting a Facebook page together, and if you want to use your logo as your one image, it better fit into a small square, otherwise you're outta luck). For a vertical outdoor sign, I had to use a different font, condensed and squished to fit across. And now, there's the whole issue of popularity: unrelated Pomegranates are popping up all over the place, including another one in Oregon, which should be illegal, but isn't (it's just morally illegal). It just adds to the confusion and brand dilution, and means that sometimes shipments get mixed up and vendors make mistakes. Vexation occurs.

But it's okay. We're just doing our little thing in our small corner of Oregon. Micro mini business, compared to some. We're not going national anytime soon (okay, not ever). Heck, even having two stores was more stress than I could have imagined. Which brings me back to The Gap. To grow like that, to be successful at retail (3,100 stores!), takes money, focus, determination, passion, and really, really good systems. Oh, did I mention money? We definitely have focus, determination, and passion. So there you be.

When phish can't schpell

This little gem ended up in my junk mail box this morning. It's not the spelling so much, but the command of the English language that needs help. The last bit really cracked me up: "Sign, Mrs. Anita Bryan." Is that all you could come up with, you imbeciles of (faux) industry? Mmm. I have a sudden, unexplained urge for some Florida Orange Juice. With a grilled spam sandwich.

BendBroadband wishes to inform you that there is a
congestion in your Chesapeake.Net e-mail account.
This is due to the spam activities going on in the
Internet. You have been contacted personally so that
you can confirm your account to avoid losing it to
Internet spam. Fill the help form below and send it
back to enable us carryout an urgent maintenance in
your e-mail account.

* Username:__________________
* Password:__________________
* Phone:_____________________

BendBroadband Technical Support Unit is opened for
Technology, Help, Information, Support, resources. etc.
Thank you for your understanding. We apologize for any
inconveniences this may have cause you!

Sign,

Mrs. Anita Brian
Technical Support Officer
(C)2009 BendBroadband. All Rights Reserved

Fan us, please

Now I know how my dad must have felt when he used to call me all the time with computer questions. It usually went like this: "Honey, I'm so frustrated. I just plugged that thingie in with the cord you told me about, and I went to start the program, and it's GONE. Also, I created a page with a headline, and now the headline is missing. What button do I push to get it back?" He was writing a music reading book, and trying to compose music for it on a keyboard attached to the Mac.

I just put a Facebook page together, and had some of the same questions. Where did that button go? Why did I just see what I needed, and now I don't see it? Which rabbit hole did I go down this time, and can I find my way back? Did I just kill my website trying to install a link? Did my computer skills stop evolving in 1996?

Anyway, it's up and running, and I think you may be able to click over to it from this blog, using the fan link on the side. If not, you can search for us on Facebook by just typing in Pomegranate Home and Garden. There's only one fan so far (moi), and I'd love to have more and see how this whole thing works. Mom? Mom? Are you reading this? Have you figured out how to get on the internet yet? [silence]