On the morning of March 9, Mark Young, owner of Costumania, erected a sign out front in LaValley’s Colonial Plaza in West Lebanon to announce the costume store was closing and everything was 75% off.
“I never thought I’d have to hang up one of those signs in my life,” Young said last week. “Thirty-two years in retail.”
Young, one of the hard-hit independent small retailers at LaValley’s Colonial Plaza in West Lebanon, will close his store for good on Wednesday. The venture has become a casualty of the internet; what he said are the predatory practices of a national Halloween pop-up chain; and, last but not least, the pandemic.
“I’ve lost $400,000 in sales the last two years. That’s why I’m closing. I’ve had enough,” Young said.
If he sounds bitter, Young says he’s not. Despite the blows his business has taken in recent years, capped by the COVID-19 hurricane that blew away countless retail businesses and restaurants, Young said he’s at peace with the decision:
“I grew up near the ocean in Massachusetts, and I love the water. I had a boat on Lake Champlain, which I sold the other day. I’m going back to live near the Seacoast. I’ve applied for a couple jobs at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. We’ll see.”
Young, 63, arrived in West Lebanon in 1987, recently out of the Navy, to work at the tuxedo shop College Formals, which he bought from his uncle. Within a few years, he added costumes in a second room. In 2005, when the building was torn down to make way for Walgreens, he moved the business into the plaza’s row of shops.
He then sold College Formals — now named Everything Tuxedo — in 2015 and moved the costume business to the other end of the building. A year later, he relocated Costumania into a two-level, 6,000-square-foot storefront at the other end of the plaza that had previously been occupied by Blue Mountain Guitar.
The new space afforded him room to stock 100,000 items.
“I was on a mission to build a monster costume store,” he said, now calling the costly expansion “the biggest mistake of my life” because it was followed, a couple years later, by a confluence of back-to-back disruptions.
Although online shopping was already taking a bite out of his business, Young said he suffered a big setback in 2019 when Party City closed in Upper Valley Plaza and the pop-up store Spirit Halloween took the space in the run-up to Halloween.
“Everybody said, ‘Oh, you’ll get their business.’ But I am not a party store. I’m a costume store,” he explained.
Although Spirit Halloween opens a store for only two months, Young said they can undersell competitors with lower overhead at one of the peak costume sales periods of the year.
Then the pandemic hit, forcing Costumania to close for three months. The pandemic meant no parties, like the annual Halloween and winter masquerade ball with the Conniption Fits at the Fireside Inn, and no balloons — a reliable moneymaker.
“I’m essentially part of the hospitality industry, and that’s been killed,” Young said.
After working 12- to 14-hour days for more than three decades running his own business, Young said he’s actually looking forward to moving to the Seacoast and recalibrating his life, whatever direction that takes him.
“I had to do a lot of soul searching. ... I’m good with all of it. I’m happy with all of it,” said Young, excusing himself for a customer who had just walked through the door.
A second servingof Piecemeal PiesThere will soon be two halves to Piecemeal Pies.
The White River Junction eatery, which opened in 2016 serving the thick savory and sweet pies that had long been a staple in English pub food, is opening a second restaurant in Stowe, Vt., in the heart of the village popular with tourists, vacationers and second-home owners.
Justin Barrett, chef and co-owner with Josh Brown, said he is targeting a June opening date — more than a year after he’d originally planned before the pandemic set him back.
But during that year, Barrett said he took the time to explore financing options beyond the traditional commercial loan from a bank, many of which have been shying away from lending to restaurants in the pandemic.
So Barrett has signed up with MainVest, a Salem, Mass., tech startup that facilitates brick-and-mortar “Main Street” businesses’ expansion and growth plans through an online platform that allows people to invest in the business in exchange for a cut of the profits.
As of early last week, Piecemeal Pies had raised $73,700 from 68 investors, exceeding its minimum $50,000 goal on the way to a maximum goal of $125,000. A minimum investment is $100 and people who invest $250 also get one of the enamel tumblers the pies come in. If they invest $5,000 they get “free coffee for life,” according to the offering.
Barrett said the average investment has been “$100 to $200” per investor, although he’s had a few run as high “in the thousands.”
To be sure, accepting funding from the public is not without its risk: Businesses soliciting investment on MainVest are required to repay $1.50 for each dollar invested — Piecemeal Pies’ listing states it must repay the money by 2028 “regardless of revenue” — and MainVest takes a steep 6% “fee” off the top.
Joining the MainVest platform also means publicly sharing the business’s past performance and financial projections, which Barrett acknowledges made him a little uneasy at first. (Piecemeal Pies is projecting $1.5 million in revenue and $435,000 in operating income in year one of the Stowe restaurant and growing to $2.5 million and $929,000, respectively, in year five.)
Barrett said he has been “just floored” by the investor response, and he recognizes the names of many of the investors as Piecemeal Pies customers.
“I really like this model because, in everything we do, we are striving to support the local economy and local food system. The money invested in us flows back into the community that supports us,” he said. “We’d have to pay this money back anyway, and it’s better it goes back into the community than a bank.”
Batteries Plus Bulbs equals West Lebanon storeVacant for two years, the red brick former post office on Main Street in West Lebanon is finally getting a new retail tenant.
Will Moore,of Derry, N.H., is opening a Batteries Plus Bulbs franchise in the former 1,300-square-foot space most recently had been occupied by payday lender Title Cash, which closed the location in 2018.
The building is owned by Larry Vincent, who owns two other commercial properties nearby on Main Street.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
The Link Lonk
March 28, 2021 at 09:26AM
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Bottom Line: West Lebanon costume shop closes; pie shop gives investors a slice - Valley News
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