Today’s the last day of INATS. Sadly, it’s a much smaller show now than it used to be. Some of the companies survive because they sell to many industries and do the big gift shows in Las Vegas and New York. Some that were just mom-and-pop ones have vanished forever, as mom and pop aged out or went to do something else.
Still, the show goes on, and for that I am grateful. I love this trade show because the people really like to connect with each other. Shop owners and manufacturers and publishers can all get to know each other. Nobody’s britches are too big here… not if you want to stay in business, that is.
Jacki Smith of Coventry Creations and Molly Trimble and Maggie Feeney of Retailing Insight magazine spend a little time talking shop on the sales floor during INATS 2013.
But still, the show is shrinking…
The Llewellyn booth used to take up six or eight 10×10 spots, access it from all sides. Hay House has also tightened its footprint. There are a lot fewer independent book and CD publishers now, too. With digital media being the more popular kind these days, this is not surprising. Books and music are not disappearing, just changing formats. Honestly, I don’t care about paper vs digital, and in some cases like the digital format a lot better, especially how I can change the type size on my Kindle. I’d like a physical demo to flip through in the store, with a thing I can scan so the shop owner can get a cut if I decide to buy the digital version.
Tarot and oracle decks, however… Those will survive. Divination has been around for millenia, and people generally will not buy secondhand decks. So far, the people aspect of card reading has not been replaced by eZoltar, so I don’t envision that niche fading away anytime soon.
Llewellyn still enjoys a nice booth at this trade show.
Majik Rox are still around, though not as abundantly as before. None of the dealers had blue or pink opal or TV stone, something I was looking for this trip. But they always have the staples and quite a bit of esoteric stuff. If I want rocks I should go to Tuscon.
Jewelry dealers are getting savvy about retailers’ price needs now that sterling silver is so high. Deva Designs, whose product lines have always pleased me, started casting their stuff in pewter several years ago. Their keychains and pocket pieces have always been this beautiful warm pewter but now the pendants and bracelets are too.
Peter Stone came up with Argentium, a silver alloy, a few years ago to try to keep their prices low. They manufacture a lot of pagan jewellery, being the main supplier of beautiful pentagrams. Pagans, generally speaking, tend to be DIY-minded folks and spend more on books than on jewellery. They might admire some of the fancy New Age bling, but they are usually budget-conscious and tend not to spring for the big flashy pieces. Peter Stone knows this and they have created a new “white brass” alloy (with no silver) that they’re calling Nebula. It is beautiful and priced along the same lines as silver was when I had the other shop 10 years ago. I ordered some of it and am looking very forward to seeing what people think about it. So we’ll have Naughties (2000s) prices again, but in a different metal.
As regards shoppers (retailers such as myself), the age difference is very obvious. I’m in my mid-40s and probably the youngest store owner there. There were some sellers with their adult kids or employees and some youngish authors, but for the most part the showroom floor was full of Baby Boomers and older Gen-X.
I’d guess that there are several reasons for not seeing the hipster-types or young witches (I’m defining “young” as under 35). I was 30 when I started playing around with a metaphysical business, 32 when I opened the first shop. To a Gen-X, that’s the right timeline, maybe even a little late to be changing careers. To a Millenial, well a lot of them are still living with mom and dad, swamped with student loan debt, and not even started on their families yet let alone having time or funds to commit to a storefront.
They are too broke to be able to fund a physical shop. It’s very expensive to open up a brick and mortar, pay for employees, etc. You cannot get a small business loan for a retail store of any kind, period, and credit really doesn’t exist like it used to. But I’m not sure that this is the main issue here, why we didn’t see this age group at INATS.
I think that it’s twofold. One, digital. This group was brought up with computers and internet, and are used to shopping online. If they were store owners, it’d probably be a webstore, and they would probably choose the products they carried by googling for whatever they were looking for.
Two, as a generation, these kids are just not new agey. True, hipsters and pagans love rocks, but I see them more likely to open rock shops or head/vape shops than metaphysical candle shops. This is not to say that they are not spiritual, but I am not seeing young pagans nearly as much as I used to. Millenials tend to be pretty casual about religion. Their version of spirituality seems to be more about being ecologically and socially active, ie “green” (pro-vegetarian, pro-nutrition, pro-recycling, anti-Montsano) , plus supporting equal rights issues. And don’t forget that whole Occupy thing, that was these young’uns too. They are like Hippies, but with internet, which kind of waters it down a bit IMHO due to the way it reinforces that identity and is self-referential. But that’s another topic for another day.
Because I am fairly well schooled in modern marketing strategies, such as this blog, I think I’ll manage to survive a while. But some of the older retailers were talking about needing to give their shops a boost. When asked if they had a Facebook account, a lot of them cringed. Blog? Well, no. Website? Ehhhh uh I’m working on it. So I told them, if you want to get these kids in your shop, you have to be where they will find you on the smartphone.
It’s math, you see. If the customers don’t know about the stores, they won’t go there, but maybe buy stuff online or at the mall (Earth Exploration or Hot Topic). If they don’t go to independent retailer new age shops, we don’t buy as much stuff from the vendors. If the vendors don’t sell as much, they go out of business, and the whole industry vanishes.
Adapt or die. We have to all find ways to keep our businesses going. You can’t force someone to believe in New Age mumbo-jumbo but if they know about you they might still want to come in and have their cards read and their souls soothed. Our niche will be needed as long as there are people with stuff on their minds.
Where will we be, though? Hybrid shops where half the time our customers look at our online shop before coming in to see if it’s worth the trip, and the other half stopping in to consider buying something but then winding up closing the sale through the online interface? (I’m not even going to start with “showrooming“, a practice that makes me so mad that if I catch you at it I will throw you out.) It’s almost essential that we have both an online and a physical location these days.
