New Park Avenue businesses mix hope with reality
In Rochester neighborhoods, small shops and stores are seeds sowed in hope. Some flower. Some wilt.
Day to day, their quiet stories of struggle and survival are played out beyond the bustle of the streets.
Take, for example, two shops — Wellness Within at 703 Park Ave. and True Touch Salon and Spa at 751 Park Ave. — that opened in the summer of 2008. Each replaced a business that had failed or lost its will to continue. In Wellness Within’s case, the departing business was a print shop that had been a Park Avenue fixture for 50 years.
True Touch opened in June 2008. Wellness Within began two months later, shortly before a weakening U.S. economy fell into the most dire straits in 70 years.
Wellness Within is owned by a woman who wishes to turn the lessons of a family crisis into a business that celebrates natural products, natural cures. True Touch Salon and Spa is owned by a couple who came halfway around the world, from a small city in central Vietnam, to cut hair and do makeup and help Americans luxuriate.
Neither business is yet a stunning success. Traffic is better at the salon on the weekends and Wellness Within is a shop in a search for itself — what to sell, how to market and communicate, how to translate ideal into revenue.
Neither store is running on fumes, either, though the five-year survival rate of small shops such as these is 50 percent at best. On average, three in 10 go belly up in the first three years. And the dangers accumulate when credit dries up, costs rise and consumer confidence dips.
The city and Mayor Robert Duffy are banking on startup businesses like these reviving and sustaining commercial districts on Park Avenue and in the South Wedge and the Maplewood area.
Duffy has done frequent ribbon-cuttings for small shops, though neither Wellness Within nor True Touch received the ceremonial treatment. But each may be eligible for grants and loans, some stimulus-funding based, that the city is assertively promoting.
For now, it’s a tightrope act.
“I’m using my credit card to keep going and it’s scary sometimes,” said Christine Legno, owner of Wellness Within. She and her family — her father, primarily — cleaned the old print shop, moved the heavy equipment out, put up an ornate tin ceiling. There’s enough room in the store for a floor display and wall shelves lined with skin and makeup products made without chemical ingredients. There’s a parlor chair and antique-looking table near the entrance that Christine borrowed from her house.
Legno is a natural-food convert. Her sister was the family proselytizer but it wasn’t until their mother, Joyce, was diagnosed with cancer for the second time that Christine became a follower.
“I saw how much better she was doing when she went to the natural diet, the natural products and stopped using all those chemicals,” Legno said. Her mother’s cancer went into remission, where it remains, and Legno had an idea for a new business.
“I believe in what I’m doing,” she said. “Business has been slow, but I’m still working at a dry cleaning business I have. I may not have done as much research as I should have when I started, but I’m learning as I go.”
The other businesses in her stretch of Park — the long-established Nathan’s Old-Fashion Soups is two doors down — have been enormously helpful, she said. “They all came in to say hello when I opened and when I’m outside sweeping the walk, I feel that I’m part of something. It’s hard to explain but it’s a good feeling.”
Lily Nguyen and her husband, Andy Hiep Nguyen, took over a failed hair salon at 751 Park Ave.
Andy had worked for the previous owner and bought her out. Both had experience, in Vietnam and in America, in hair care and spa and salon work.
They had a nest egg to tide them over during the rough first few months and haven’t been forced to use much credit.
The spa has a contract to sell the popular Aveda skin products, and Andy had good client connections from his previous employment at the salon.
The couple said they had a business base — “we have people coming in from Penfield, Pittsford,” Lily Nguyen said — and they are taking some business-savvy steps, such as offering discounts and setting aside some money for advertising.
The Nguyens said the neighborhood has helped them and, like Legno, the couple has turned to family from time to time to get through.
Both shops know they can make it.
So many shops along Park Avenue have succeeded, drawing on the dense, diverse neighborhood of college students, young professionals and empty nesters.
Some shops have wilted, too, including the two that had the storefronts before Legno and the Nguyens.
But dreams aren’t made of that kind of history.
TTOBIN@DemocratandChronicle.com
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Think home: When searching for the best small business to start on a shoestring, a home-based business wins hands down. You eliminate roughly 32 percent of traditional overhead costs.
Think cheap: It is near impossible to start a retail store with no money. Unless you have stockpiled a sizable sum, it is very likely that you would need small-business startup loans. Finding the best business to start without money will require some Internet market research.
Find free sources of funding: Reducing costs at the business planning stage is essential. Many budding entrepreneurs don’t realize that there are many creative strategies for starting a business without a heavy debt load from loans or borrowing from family and friends.
