Reading

I picked up another copy of Paco Underhill's Why We Buy for Eileen at the store. It's a book about the science of buying, store design, and how people generally want to be treated when they shop. It's not just how to sell more stuff, it's how to make the retail experience more rewarding for the customer (who will then buy more stuff).

Why We Buy has great advice about store layout, which is something I'm working on right now. I've got a store layout for the new space, but it was more of an exercise in getting things to fit than an optimized plan. So what's a good example? Shopping baskets need to be with items that require them, not at the front of the store. We used to have them in the Flames of War section but now we're out of space. It makes you wonder how that has effected things. I often feel that I could sell more stuff if I had less stuff. If I could feature the really good stuff, maybe I would sell more that way rather than obscuring product in the vast forest of stuff.

Other reading? I just had two days off in a row, a rarity, so I caught up with 3 weeks worth of The Economist. The subscription is so expensive (it was a gift from my wife), that I feel obligated to read them all. I could rave about this news magazine, but just let me say it's fantastic, matches my political sensibilities and is highly recommended. It seems centrist to me with rational, common sense that's so rare in the US.

Today I picked up book two of David Edding's Belgariad series. The first book was recommended by a friend and I can see getting into it. It's got great character development. It also has my pet peeve of fantasy, the Chosen One. I like the "rising to the ocassion" hero you find in Lord of the Rings and similar fantasies. Frodo stepped up and took the challenge. It wasn't Gandalf or Aragorn, it was a simple hobbit and his friend. I don't like Luke Skywalker and I can't get into Harry Potter (the last book will be at the store this week). The hero of Star Wars is Han Solo if you ask me.

Doodoos and FooFoos

We took my two year old son, Rocco, to a couple of toy stores yesterday. As I had hoped, he spent most of his time with the product lines I had just ordered. Yes, I've been using him for market research.

When I realized the store needed to diversify, there were a number of mostly bad options. Video games, which we tried, just didn't feel right. I still can't figure out the business model for LAN gaming, it seems like the numbers don't add up. Straight games was all about diminishing returns. Comic books definitely wasn't it either.

We're doing comics in the new location, but only dabbling. The comics business is the most idiosyncratic, backwards, monopolistic one I can imagine and I wouldn't touch it if there wasn't such great demand for it. Why do magazines (including comics) come out on Wednesdays? Traditionally, the horses that pulled the ice wagons were free that day. And we just kept on doing it that way.

Toys was not exactly a shoe-in. I'm a game guy. I don't know jack about toys. However, I have a subject matter expert (SME) that I live with, and thus I have learned a lot about toys in the past couple of years. The first toy line I'm bringing in is one I tried to avoid, but eventually it seemed obvious: The Thomas Wooden Railway System. I literally wake up in the morning with Thomas. Occasionally I'll wake up on a Thomas that Rocco brought to bed with him the night before. He calls trains "foo-foos," and he literally can't get enough of them. Despite the lead paint issue, this is a solid gold product line that every two year old must have. It's sold at every worthy toy store and all know it as golden. It's the Dungeons & Dragons equivalent in the toy world; something you obviously carry if you want to be taken seriously (and make money). We're starting with about a third of the Thomas line, as well as a ton of compatible accessories from Melissa & Doug.

Below is the Thomas recycling center, a toy, I'm told that children don't really care for but some adults insist on buying

Along with Foo-Foo's we're getting racks of toy cars from ERTL. ERTL makes inexpensive, basic die-cast vehicles that young kids eat up: school buses, taxis, Hummers, muscle cars, airplanes, you name it. ERTL has been in business for decades making these things. They're in various scales and young kids could care less. Put a giant car on a tiny flatbad truck. Who cares?

Schleich is another company like RC2, who makes Thomas. Every store worth a darn has a bunch of this stuff, and I personally geek out over it. It's for older kids; Rocco doesn't care. They've got a line of medieval figures, fantasy, old-west, and animals.

The next level of toys we're bringing in are various science kits for older kids from the John Hansen folks. You can build a crystal radio, create slime or a volcano, or learn about the weather. Also from Hansen are those goo-gaws you just expect from a toy store: kazoos, frisbees, slinky's, etc. These are also the things that embarrass me with their kitsch.

Finally, we filled in our gaps with Melissa & Doug. This is one of those companies known mostly to mothers of small children. They make high quality, low cost toys that are practically ubiquitious. For us, we bought: doll houses, puppets, kitchen sets, puzzles, stuffed animals (Doo-Doos, as Rocco says), craft kits, train accessories, and much more. The M&D stuff I took mostly on faith, as I have no idea about what most kids play with. Luckily M&D offers to return anything that doesn't sell for you in exchange for stuff that does. We've tried some of it in the store already and it does alright.

So how does this work from a business perspective? We bring it in, try to figure out how best to merchandise and sell it, and then fine tune. Maybe the toy farm equipment does really poorly. Maybe there's a toy the Hispanic community digs on, as Concord is a quarter Hispanic (compared to the three guys who live in Walnut Creek). The hard parts will be:

1. Actively selling it. Have you ever seen anyone actually sell a toy? Sure, they have them for sale, but that's not the same thing. We'll have to learn how to sell toys and overcome any personal issues surrounding that (a problem with some game people).
2. Containment. When you diversify like this, you need to keep your buying budget and your floor space separate. It would be easy for game sales to eclipse toy sales during some parts of the year and vice versa. You don't want to be heading into Christmas, only to learn that your game inventory took over your toy section and you now need to spend $20,000 on toys.
3. Advertising. We spend a lot of money on advertising games, but what about toys? If it's only a quarter of what we sell, how much effort do we put into advertising it?

Who is this Gantt Guy Anyway?

So how do you build a place, carpet it, paint it, add fixtures and stuff without losing your mind? You use a chart developed in 1917 by this guy called Charles Gantt. I'm about to become obsessed figuring out what this guy needed to chart out in 1917 that was so complicated. I'll have to do more research.

A Gantt chart charts out time on the X axis and tasks on the Y axis. It's a project management tool that you can use for just about anything and there is, of course, tricky software to do it. Microsoft Project is what I use, but Excel works fine for small stuff. One of my many IT jobs in my past life was as a project manager. Unfortunately, or fortunately, nobody else except other project managers could read the chart. It made me look really smart with management (not hard to do), but it didn't exactly make me the great communicator. A Gantt chart looks something like this:

The key points is that you can assign dependencies. For example, I need to order toys for the new toy section. I can attach it to the fixture delivery task or the delivery "milestone." This means that if the fixture date gets moved, I automatically bump forward my toy deliveries by that amount of time. You need to have fixtures before you get your stock. Before the fixtures arrive, I need to have the carpet in, otherwise I'm moving stuff from room to room while my annoyed carpet installers stand around and grumble (getting them coffee helps). Before the carpet is in, the painting needs to be done, unless I want paint splatter on my carpet. Before the painting needs to be done, the new dividing walls need to be built, important since I'm getting free paint from the landlord - I might as well paint the whole space, right? I can't do any of those things until I take possession of the space on August 1st. So it all links together in a very happy and complicated diagram that only I can read.

While that linked chain of dependencies plays itself out, I'm also doing other tasks. We need a completely new exterior sign. We need another 4x8 table built. We need several licenses and permits (business, alarm, sign). We need to change our advertising. The phone service needs to be installed (we couldn't keep our old number, unfortunately). It's actually kind of fun, mostly because it's predictable. What's scary are the unknowns. Will there be ancient Indian artifacts under the floor tiles? Will the city deny our business license for "games" because they think we're going to run a casino? A day into the two day move, will we discover we've got a weeks worth of moving work?

The neat thing about the Gantt chart is that you can watch your project implode with great detail. I know this from managing projects in IT. Often, the best thing you can do with your fancy chart is place blame. "It's really clear by this half blue bar on line 154 that the networking department was to finish installing BGP4 routing by June 1st." So yes, a Gantt chart is really about CYA. This is especially important in project management in a big company because you usually have no control over the people doing the work. The best you can do is implore their managers to motivate their staff. The worst case scenario is to blame a bad manager in front of their boss or peers for not giving you the available resources. Of course, CYA when you have your own business is pretty worthless. Failure is really not an option.

The Official Notice

It's official. Black Diamond Games is moving to a much larger location.

When:We're closing on September 23rd. We'll be closed 9-23 and 9-24 and re-opening at the new location on 9-25.

Where:1950 Market StreetConcord, CA 94520Where's That? It's in the shopping comlex known as "Park N Shop," also known as the Fry's Electronics shopping center. We're on the West side of the complex (far left of Fry's) across from the Mini and BMW dealerships. The spot is between a Weight Watchers and an empty space followed by a sushi restaurant.

How do I get there?
The new space is 9 minutes away from the old space, only about 3 miles. From the new space, you would take the 680 for 2 miles to the 242. Take the 242 one mile to the Clayton Rd exit, turn right on Market street and voila! Click here for details: http://tinyurl.com/392w4o

What does this space offer?
We've been privately calling it Black Diamond Games 2.0 for a while now and we're not far off. It's 3,300 square feet compared to our current 1,040 square foot location. Check this out:

• Acres of free parking. Nobody I've talked to has ever seen a full parking lot here.
• 1000 square foot game space. If you don't know what that means, imagine our current store, completely full of game tables for playing. This will include several 4x8 terrain tables for our miniature games (one is already built, more will follow). This means we can have regular events of any size really, and events at the same time so we don't have to compete with each other for event space. Play space is free.
• Twice the retail space. As of about a year ago, anything new I added to the store meant something else had to go; we were out of space. Now you can expect our game selection to expand by about 50% and you can expect games to be displayed better with many demo tables. You might be surprised how many games we have now - if you could actually see them! About a quarter of the new store will be dedicated to kids toys: Thomas Wooden Railway System, Melissa & Doug, Schleich toys (knights, fantasy, old west, toy animals), ERTL toy vehicles, etc.

Oh yes, and we'll be selling comics! Our comic selection will be primarily trade paperpacks and graphic novels with a slow but steady build-up to monthly comic book sales as we figure out what we're doing. If there's a comic you would like us to carry, let us know now as we've already set up the account and we need several months notice for new comic titles. The trade paperpacks will start showing up at the current store starting next week.

We've been listening to you for several years now and we hope the new Black Diamond Games will finally have everything you've been looking for in a game store! Game space, parking, selection, more stuff and all in Contra Costa County!

Maps

I love maps. The store used to have a lot more of them on the wall, but we ran out of space. Maybe I'll line the new game room with various maps, real and fantasy.

Anyway, here is that map I mentioned before. It's a map of customer density. We have about 500 people in our Paladin Club who account for about 2/3rds of our sales. That says a lot about the dismal walk-in traffic of our current location. I think club members (regulars) should be a lower percentage.

The red areas are the highest concentration of BDG customers, mostly Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill. Yellow is the fewest and gray is nobody at all. Pleasant Hill was my first choice of a location, but it didn't work out. Instead we're moving to Concord, pretty much where the Concord marker is on the map.

This map is about a year old, by the way.

Stained

Late breaking news...

The Magic 4x8

The magic formula is 4x8, the optimal table size. A Warhammer 40k game requires 4x6 and a Warmachine game requires a 4x4. Build a 4x8 and you can play two Warmachine games (our #1 game in the store) or a Warhammer game with a place for your extra junk.

Here's our first 4x8 table. It still needs to be stained and the table top flocked, but it is finished. I spent about an hour helping on this, but the credit goes to others.

We'll probably have two 4x8's, maybe three. We used the plans from the Drunk Dwarves website: http://www.drunkdwarves.com/pages/artttgttcultimatetable.html

I'll probably limit the 4x8 table numbers because of their immense size and weight. These tables are enormous and take two very strong people to move them. The standard tables will be 6x2.5' folding tables, usable for anything and easily stored and moved.