A part-time business racks up full-time profits for Carl
Wiederaenders of Des Moines, Iowa, who operates his Calendar Club
stores from mid-September to mid-February each year. With 1997
revenues of more than $2.4 million, Wiederaenders has already
marked his calendar for this year's holiday season.
As a temporary mall tenant, Wiederaenders is part of a growing
trend: entrepreneurs who capitalize on increased consumer traffic
during the winter holidays, October through December. "[The
best time to] be in retail is when people are shopping,"
Wiederaenders says. "And during the holidays, there are more
people shopping than at any other time of the year."
Such specialty leasing, also called seasonal selling, started
during the mid-1980s as a way for malls to fill empty storefronts
and corridors with temporary carts, stores and kiosks.
"It's an inexpensive way to build a store for yourself and
put it in the busiest part of a mall, where thousands of people
walk by every day," says Tom Vitacco, national sales director
for retail licensing at Fannie May Candies.
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Franchise and business opportunity companies such as Fannie May
and Calendar Club provide entrepreneurs with a ready-made means of
entry into temporary businesses as franchisees or licensees--and
often make start-up easy by negotiating leases, providing
merchandise or designing business plans.
Entrepreneurs who buy the Calendar Club business opportunity,
for instance, use the company's name, operating system,
procedures, displays and products. Special cash registers not only
ring up sales, calculate sales tax and run daily register reports,
but also dial into the distribution center at day's end so
Calendar Club can replenish your inventory and automatically deduct
its share from your bank account, leaving behind your 16
percent.
Calendar Club, founded in 1993, even provides its 90 operators
with an assortment of calendars targeted to individual regions'
demographics. For instance, a Calendar Club near a ski resort would
stock more ski calendars than an urban location would.
Wiederaenders, who runs a home renovation business the rest of
the year, joined Calendar Club in 1993 after managing a
friend's store for a season. He opened five stores the
following year, for a fee of $2,500 each. His revenues from
mid-November to the first week of January that year surpassed
$400,000. Last year, he oversaw 26 stores in the Midwest. He
travels from location to location during the week and hires
managers to help run his stores.
Sandra Mardenfeld, a freelance writer in New York City, has
written for The New York Times Book Review and Working
Woman.
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