Toronto cult flick video store owner Luis Ceriz tells tales from his over 2 decades running the legendary SUSPECT Video.
Many people over the years have asked me for my humble advice on the intricacies of opening a video store. My answer today is different to what it would have been a decade ago:
DON’T DO IT! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS UNHOLY, DONT!
There’s a multitude of other more fun ways of fulfilling your masochistic tendencies but if the desire is overwhelmingly burning a hole in your loins or if you’re just interested in the process of how one would go about fulfilling a dream and setting up a shop of your own, I’m more than happy to rip my brain open and spill out my two cents worth.
THE REALLY BORING STUFF
First up you must decide what kind of legal entity your exciting new business is gonna be: Sole proprietorship, partnership, limited company, etc. I won’t go into the details as you can easily look them up but ultimately you’ll have to register your business and get a tax number under your operating name.
What is in a name you may ask? Plenty! You’ve got to pick something that is not only memorable but that reflects the cool one-of-a-kind shoppe you’re going to open and, like choosing what tattoo youre going to get, make sure you can live with it for a looong time.
We went through an agonizing period of only coming up with truly putrid names (Video Video, The Village Idiot, Crappy Little Video Store, Rewind This!) before we stumbled upon what we thought was a pretty great name, As we walked down the street some dumb sign or other was commented on by my partner as being highly suspect.
Suspect! Thats it! We felt that word perfectly described the kind of counter culture/social limit pushing establishment we wanted to create!
A quick bit of advice: don’t incorporate the street you’re on in the name as you’ll feel like a dumbass and will get exceedingly tired of explaining it when/if you have to move off said street.
MORE BORING STUFF: BUDGET
My partner and I in Suspect never budgeted but we were idiots. Learn from our idiocy. Make a list of fixed costs (expenses that remain constant every month).
Unless you’re in some kind of sweetheart deal the day to day expenses of an actual physical store are:
Insurance (a pain in the ass but necessary).
Phone (use your cell if need be and to cut costs in credit card/debit card processing use something like Square-no processing machine to shell out cash for and pretty comparable rates for processing).
Rent (duh).
Utilities (heat, electricity, water, property tax which most landlords will make you pay).
Alarm system (also a bit of a pain-go for the cheapest you can find-itll pay for itself because you can usually get a bit of a deal on insurance if you show them an alarm company is monitoring your place).
PLUS if you’re in a mall or something similar you’ll have to pony up additional fees for the upkeep of the common area but DON’T DO MALLS!
Many have rigid standards regarding the look of the businesses. If you’re anything like our cheap asses you’ll want to cut corners wherever possible and the whole DIY aesthetic is pretty well not tolerated.
LOCATION
It’s an old adage that choice of location is the most important business decision you will make and, well, that’s true but as you’d expect, prime location means prime price. Main streets will always fetch top dollar.
Sunny sides of the street will add a premium (something Realtors won’t tell you-the idea being that the sunnier side of any street will have the greater pedestrian traffic) but unless you’re the type of person who loves to change your window display often, yer gonna end up with a display window of ugly, useless, sun damaged goods.
Also dont be afraid to negotiate. If a place has been empty for a while try talking the price down a bit. Or see if you can get a month (or two) for free for building, painting etc. so youre not paying for the space until youre open. The worst thing that can happen is they say no.
So what should you look for?
Save cash and up your coolness by maybe choosing an up and coming
neighborhood that hasn’t been overrun by hipsters. Or choosing a storefront that is close but not actually on a main street (though you would have to rely more on word of mouth and advertising plus sandwich boards to help people realize walking twenty feet off the beaten track may be worth it).
Or maybe splitting a space with some kind of complimentary business.
Be real careful with this last one. Usually one of the businesses will hold the lease and be in communication with the landlord. The other will be renting from them.
With this situation comes the question: can the space be divided or will both businesses have the same hours?
In a perfect shared situation each store would split expenses/advertising costs etc. and attract unique customers that may not have come to each store individually but would discover the other by default: a win/win situation I hear you say. Everyone’s doing great and every day is a rainbow covered fantasy come true.
Well, the reality is that most businesses fail and if this starts to happen it’s a slow motion shit-hitting-the-fan situation. We once sub leased a portion of a huge space from a record store and opened a second location. All was well for a time. But in the age before people rediscovered that vinyl was cool the record store was
floundering but we weren’t privy to that fact.
After being there a couple of years we were offered to rent additional space as they didn’t need it. Made sense to us and we needed the extra space but in hindsight it should have been seen as a bit of a red flag.
After a few more years we rented even more space from them. What we
didn’t know was that the record store increasingly used our rent to pay suppliers and not the actual rent on the space. They eventually midnight moved from the place leaving us kind of holding the bag.
Fortunately, even though the landlords were, on the whole, unholy pricks, they were understanding and we all worked it out agreed on entering a lease directly from them for only the space we occupied until the building and four other neighboring ones burned down in one of Toronto’s biggest fires (more on that in a later article).
Bottom line: be careful in partnering up and work out as many contingency details as possible.
Next article Ill tackle such things as store layout, dealing with
distributors and how the biz really works.
Until then viddy well friends.
Luis the Suspect guy
