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If you were to take a stroll down the shopping haven that is Prince Street in downtown Manhattan, you’d come across two distinct camps of brick-and-mortar locations: need-to-have stores and nice-to-have stores. Smack dab in the middle of the bustling SoHo neighborhood, you’re more likely to find the latter, with sky-high real estate prices that suit tenants like Apple and Louis Vuitton — companies that would do well even if they didn’t have outposts there. Go a few blocks east, though, and you’ll land in Nolita, a charming, trendy area with a bit more edge. Nolita, in many cases, is the land of need-to-have stores — including us at Studs.
When navigating your retail growth, the distinction between need-to-have and nice-to-have is a crucial one. It’s how we’ve built our company to 23 profitable stores since my co-founder Lisa Bubber and I first founded Studs — a retail and ecommerce brand that has reimagined the ear piercing experience — in 2019. Because, as it turns out, there’s no such thing as a business built on ear piercing without a physical space to actually do the piercing itself. So here are three pieces of advice I offer to any new entrepreneur looking to grow their business and wanting to know if a physical store is right for them.