6 Location Lessons Small Business Owners Learned so You Don’t Have To

Location, location, location are the key words in real estate for a reason. The location of a store can make or break your success. ICSC Small Business Center has curated insights from some of the small business owners we’ve interviewed over the years: what they wish they’d thought about and the things that revealed themselves as important in finding a brick-and-mortar location.

Foot Traffic

“For our first five years, we were in a different building. That space was one street behind what was considered the main street in our district. It’s next to a public parking lot and right near the river. So on paper, everything seemed right. But it turns out one street behind Main Street makes a big difference. I don't know that we understood what kind of difference that would make in terms of foot traffic. For five years, the amount of money we had to spend to acquire every single customer was a real challenge for our business. After that lease was up, we looked for another space that was in a more high-traffic area. We moved into our new space in September of 2019, right before COVID. We didn’t know it at the time, but that move saved us during COVID because we had visibility and natural foot traffic to our store.”

—April Peterson, co-owner of River Rock Outfitter, an outdoor retail store in Fredericksburg, Virginia

Read more from River Rock Outfitter: 2 Innovative Ways to Grow Your Target Audience

“By being in a mall, we’ve had access to a lot of customers that other game stores might not because a standalone game store you’d have to seek out. You’d have to go there intentionally, whereas a lot of people go to the mall just to walk around. So we’ve had people come in, and we run learn-to-play classes. We’ve had a lot of people sign up to learn these games just because they’re like: ‘Oh, I never thought about it, but if you’re teaching, I will. I want to try it.’ It has actually opened us up to a whole demographic that we wouldn’t have if we were just in a standalone store.

—Lisa Hall, co-founder of Level 1 Gamers at The Shops at South Town in Sandy, Utah

Read more from Level 1 Gamers: Building a Store Around a Clear-Cut Niche and a Strong Community

Accessible Parking

“This is one very, very important point that we missed. We have huge challenges with parking. The streets around that [residential] complex — none of them have parking in the streets. And in the complex itself, the parking is very limited. Customers are constantly asking: ‘Where can I park?’ So we lose a lot of sales due to that. If we go to open another cafe, the first thing I’m going to ask is about parking.”

—Kelly Makker, owner of Avatar Coffee Roasters in Santa Ana, California

Read more from Avatar Coffee Roasters: Launching a Business

Understanding of the Consumers in Your Trade Area

“I did not challenge myself enough on the demographics in our area. Shakopee is a lot of single-family, 30- to 60-year-olds. It does not have a university nearby. We don’t have the 20-somethings coming through. It’s husbands and wives, business groups. It equates to more of a responsible drinker: people who have two, two-and-a-half beers per transaction. It means that we are not open until 2 a.m. because we don’t have the clientele for that. I’ve traveled and done enough market research to see that if you’re a brewery that's adjacent to a college, you are going to get the people that are going to probably start having a beer by noon versus [our clientele] punching out and being done for work at 4 and then thinking: ‘Let’s go have dinner at home and then we’ll go grab a couple of drinks afterwards.’ Our sweet spot is 3 to 9 p.m., and I’m happy with what we have. If were to be dropped next to college, maybe I’d hate it. But as I look on the other side of the fence, I can’t help but wonder.

—Ryan Lindquist, co-owner of Shakopee Brewhall, a suburb of Minneapolis

Read more from Shakopee Brewhall: This Brewery Started Opening at 7 A.M. to Find a Larger Audience

Awareness of Gaps in the Market

“We wanted to go to Columbus, where sneaker culture is really popular. If you throw a rock in Columbus, you’re probably going to hit a sneaker store. As we were looking at spaces, though, we realized [that] in addition to the store, we both would have to find a place to live, and that seemed expensive. Then, we remembered this Glenbrook Square mall in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which was only about 45 minutes from us. We’re like: ‘Fort Wayne is the second-biggest city in Indiana. There’s got to be a market there.’ Unlike Columbus, there was nothing like that here, and we weren’t just attracting customers from Fort Wayne. In a two-and-a-half- or three-hour radius, there were no other stores like us. So many people from all the small cities around Fort Wayne who come to the mall for their back-to-school shopping and regular shopping. People relate to that mall a lot versus when you go to bigger cities, where they might not visit malls at all.

—Peter Flores, co-founder of Laced Midwest, a small chain of sneaker resale shops

Read more from Laced Midwest: From Sneakerheads to Store Owners

Testing a Location

“I had always vacationed on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, and there’s nothing on the island. When my kids were little, the only retail store there was Lilly Pulitzer. Not to knock Lilly Pulitzer, but it just wasn’t my jam. We found out that the PGA tour was coming to Kiawah and I thought: “This is a great opportunity for us to test the water. Let’s just do a three-month popup and see how it goes. We worked with Northwood Retail. They owned Freshfields Village at the time, and I was just like: ‘Hey, I’m from Charlotte. We don’t have a store, but we would like to just see if we could do a pop-up here for the PGA tour and offer this, and here are our brands. We were really taking a risk [on the consumer]: Is this woman really going to gravitate to what we have? We opened the day of the PGA tour with a pop-up, and in three days, we made six figures. I knew that we had something there.

—Erica Hanks, founder and owner of Showroom, an omnichannel women’s designer and retailer with brick-and-mortar locations on Kiawah Island in South Carolina and in Austin, Texas