by Jess McCuan

Laraine Meyer of Flashback Vintage Modern in West Asheville has started selling her funky furniture on eBay, where the pieces often fetch higher prices than in her shop. But she doesn’t want to go completely virtual—“I think I’d go crazy staying home with my computer,” she says. PHOTO BY JESS McCUANVirginia Teel, owner of The Wrinkled Egg in Flat Rock, sees her online business as a complement to sales in her Flat Rock retail store. Online sales make up less than half of the company’s revenue, but, “we wouldn’t compete in this business if we weren’t online,” she says. PHOTO BY RIMAS ZAILSKAS

A few months ago, when Laraine Meyer started posting pictures of her vintage couches and funky lamps on eBay, she wasn’t sure what to expect. For most of last year, business at her jam-packed 624-square-foot West Asheville shop, Flashback Vintage Modern, was reasonably brisk. But this year, with the economy sputtering, fewer people have been stopping in, so she decided to try her luck online. Fortunately—or rather, unfortunately, in some ways—the furniture sold for almost double what it might have in her store. 

The online sales were only unfortunate because they confirmed what Meyer suspected—that she could make more money selling her niche products online than she could selling them in a brick-and-mortar retail store. It’s a common fork in the road for smaller retailers these days but a particularly critical choice in a sluggish economy, when cutting a huge overhead cost like rent might radically improve a business’s bottom line. To be sure, some businesses are better suited to online sales than others, and some shop owners prefer to peddle their wares electronically because they don’t like the retail environment in the first place. But for people like Meyer, who like interacting with customers face to face and love perfecting the look and feel of a physical retail environment, the entrepreneurial balancing act seems to boil down to this: How to devise an online sales strategy that boosts your physical shop.

Virginia Teel seems to have found something of a synergy. She opened her Flat Rock shop, The Wrinkled Egg, in the summer of 1990 as a garden tools and outdoor store and then repositioned it the next summer as a place to buy gifts for kids who go away to summer camp. It sounds like the narrowest of niches. But The Wrinkled Egg, situated within ten minutes’ drive of nearly 20 Henderson County summer camps, became known as a place to buy specialty teen items like journals, pajamas and “autographable” pillowcases. In the mid-‘90s when Teel launched a website, customers only placed about one order a day online. Now, especially during peak season, the company can get 100 orders a day through its website, with parents from faraway cities placing orders for summer-camp care packages ranging in price from $30 to $100 that include everything from fold-up chairs to lap desks and glow-in-the dark Frisbees. “We couldn’t compete in this business if we weren’t online,” Teel says. “Our competitors would be online and the parents would make the choice to do it the easier way.”

Still, Teel says online sales make up less than half her company’s revenue, and even if they someday outpace sales at the physical store in a historic Flat Rock building, she would never want to leave the store behind. “The reason I went into retail is that I absolutely love the science of shopping, understanding why people buy what they buy,” she says. “I like the relationship of retail—watching someone discover something tucked into a corner on a shelf. I’m not in retail to watch the orders come in on a computer screen.” 

Often, for a new business, deciding whether or not to sell online depends on what business you decide you’re in. Last year when Kristin Keliher and Christen Ward started Honeywear, which sells baby carriers made from organic cotton, they ruled out renting a brick-and-mortar store right away. “We didn't want a baby boutique,” says Keliher. They did, however, want to sell their Baby Bee Slings at other people’s baby boutiques, so they first reached out to a handful of local shops, like West Asheville’s The Littlest Bird. Now they sell slings online and at 15 high-end boutiques around the country, and they’re planning to roll out a line of organic kids’ clothing in 2009. Like Meyer at Flashback, Honeywear makes more profit on the carriers it sells online—mainly because they’re selling direct to customers with no middleman (or middlewoman, rather) in between who takes a cut to pay for upkeep on a physical retail shop.

Some niche businesses may just be too specalized to thrive in a brick-and-mortar mode, especially in a smaller market.  Sybil Argintar, an Asheville architectural consultant, ran Merletti (the Italian word for lace) as a European-style brick-and-mortar store in downtown Asheville for four years. The 500-square-foot shop was packed floor-to-ceiling with handmade linens she’d bought from women artisans around the world—French tablecloths, South African mohair weavings and Peruvian backstrap weavings, along with textiles and art by Western North Carolina women. But she saw a downturn in sales starting at the end of 2006, and earlier this year when she realized Merletti’s overhead—the store’s rent, plus wages for two part-time employees—was simply too much, she converted the business into an online-only shop. She does miss the face-to-face interaction with customers. “It was fun to tell people about the product, and it's something I thought was a unique product in Asheville—something you don’t find except in much bigger cities,” she says. But selling online does mean she has a higher profit margin on each sale, namely because her overhead is way down, and an online shop is a relatively low-maintenance way to keep Merletti going. She’s now freed up to travel during the day for architectural work, helping city governments and private clients assess the historic value of their buildings, something she’s done for 23 years.   

The Wrinkled Egg has carved out an unusual niche, selling care packages to parents who want to send their children a gift at summer camp. The care packages, in distinctive yellow boxes, include everything from journals and pajamas to "autographable" pillow cases. At left, Wrinkled Egg owner Virginia Teel with her daughters, Annie Starr and Virginia Frances. PHOTO BY RIMAS ZAILSKASVirginia Teel says The Wrinkled Egg’s sales have been slightly off all year, and she notes that, in a protracted slowdown, eBay might start to look attractive to everyone, not just business owners. “People will start looking around their houses to see what they can sell to raise money,” she says. But long before then, she’s focusing on getting in touch with her core customers—parents who want to send their kids a gift at summer camp—and she believes those parents will deprive themselves of a long list of items before they forego buying their kids a care package. “We may not sell as many $100 packages, but we’ll keep selling them,” she says. 

For her part, Meyer is far from ready to throw in the towel and will use her eBay sales as a supplement to her shop’s income. “You do what you can for as long as you can,” she says. “The money seems to be online, but the store is the part I enjoy. I think I’d go crazy staying home with my computer.”