'Every Small Business Can Have a Great Storefront'

Elevating Your Business, Your Property and Your Neighborhood

Rarely does a tax office or a corner bodega strike awe in a passerby — let alone even catch their eye. But Storefront Mastery — a creative marketing agency run by architect and bookstore owner Jaime Izurieta — is on a mission to change that.

Working with small business-based economic development organizations including Main Street America and local groups such as business improvement districts (BIDs), the Montclair, New Jersey-based consultancy helps guide design interventions and experiential enhancements that create “great storefronts.”

The intention is always to create a “win-win,” Izurieta told LoopNet; elevating not just the value of an individual business, but also the property it’s in, the street it’s on, and the entire neighborhood ecosystem in which it operates.

When Mediocre Storefronts Get a Makeover

Though Izurieta’s clients are often civic stakeholders, his end-users are small businesses that typically fall into one of three categories: struggling, flatlining or visionary.

“Flatliners” make up the bulk of small businesses.

These are the corner stores, dry cleaners and beauty salons, for example, that are solid — but not stellar. “They sell their products, honor their suppliers and pay their rent,” Izurieta said. “But they don’t turn enough of a profit to create new things or invest in changing the design of their storefront.”

Neighborhood ecosystems rely on these businesses, though, so placemaking organizations will often put money on the table for store owners “to become more visible, get more customers and be stronger players” in the community.

Through public grants, pooled funds, levies or other incentives, a program might offer a store anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000, he said. Izurieta’s work in these cases doesn’t entail massive interventions requiring construction permits, but cosmetic solutions such as changing a blade sign to a wall sign or using paint and basic materials to refresh the façade.

But, he said, “You’d be surprised how many of them don’t take free money.”

To get buy-in from store owners, Izurieta makes proposals that are a product of their knowledge; through fielding info about how the business operates and how they’d like their particular type of business to look and feel. He interviews business owners not about their taxes, payroll and supply chain, but about the public-facing aspects of their operations. “What is the interaction with your customers? What is the information they see on your signs? What is the experience of walking into the store and buying something?”

He's seen store owners who initially didn’t seem to care about the process go on to “create something fabulous with just a few tips that we give them about their display design.”

Then there are the businesses that are struggling. “Some enterprises don’t have the means, the knowledge or the will to invest in marketing. Some don’t even have a concrete business model,” Izurieta explained. In these cases, he said, “we try not to go too far with physical interventions because if you are not able to make rent, it’s probably not wise to invest four or five thousand dollars on a new sign.”

Barring fundamental issues, though, no store is unqualified for the type of design refresh that Izurieta does.

“Every single business can have a great storefront,” Izurieta said.

Take something like accounting, for example. “I had a tax accessor in Highland Park, New Jersey, who was like, ‘My business is boring.’ If you walk by, you see two desks with people working on computers, doing other people’s taxes. It’s not the most glamorous thing,” he said. “But it’s a business that everybody needs, and it’s right on the sidewalk in a particular place with particular characteristics,” allowing it to entertain and engage people strolling by or getting pizza two doors down, he said.

Referencing the concept of the “experience economy,” Izurieta said that the ideal for some top-tier businesses is to be not just a place that sells products or services, but an attraction. “Most businesses will never even consider charging an entry fee, but the aim is to be so awesome that they could.”

It doesn’t matter what the business is, he said. “As long as the owners speak the language of growth, of abundance, of creation of wealth and creation of wellbeing for the entire neighborhood.”

It’s the “visionary” operators like these who are much more open to new ideas, he continued. “They understand the potential of adding more complex and thus more costly offerings … not just to attract new types of customers to their stores but to elevate the entire context of their community.”

 

 

 

So, whether you make changes that are eye-catching, experiential or even existential, how do you measure success?

“Design interventions are mostly qualitative,” Izurieta said. “But I'm starting to develop a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for both the districts and the businesses … measuring how many more customers come in, and how many comment that they are coming in because they saw the new design.”

But a particular business only gets more customers walking by if certain tactical recommendations are implemented at the district level, he continued. Foot traffic varies tremendously by location, but he said it’s on a more even playing field when there’s support from placemaking interventions such as pedestrian spaces, accessible paths and outdoor seating.

“On a district level, the KPI is mortality,” he said. “If you have businesses that were only staying open for 1.5 years, and now after two years of doing this, your businesses are staying open for 1.8 years, there is a chance that the interventions that we proposed [are working].”

But it doesn’t matter how many people wander into a store if they ultimately favor an alternative online shopping experience, Izurieta continued. “What a lot of people do now is go into a store, try on sneakers, for example, and then go buy them on Amazon.”

The antidote, he said, is the “omnichannel experience.” It’s incredibly important for small brick-and-mortar businesses to invest in their online storefronts as well, he said. “More and more businesses are creating amazing online experiences that mimic a consistent, branded experience of shopping in person so that if customers choose to shop online, they do so on the store’s website and not other people’s channels that charge a big commission.”

Small businesses don’t necessarily need to invest in their web development, though, he continued. Beyond Main, for instance, is “a shopping platform that has all the infrastructure for payments and inventories and everything a store needs, but the developer of it doesn’t charge commission because she works with Main Street America and other organizations that help uplift local small businesses and brands.”