What kind of retail (if any) should you offer? – DSP 36

In this episode, Graham and Ashkahn expound on the nuances of offering retail in a float center. Everything from what to sell, to how to sell it, and how you can expect it to affect your bottom line.

All the Float Related Books we Publish – Coincidence Control Publishing

Other Retail We Carry:

Onnit 

Color Therapy Glasses

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is, “What kind of retail, if any at all, should I offer in my float center?”

Ashkahn: Retail in the float center.

Graham: The old R in the FC.

Ashkahn: It’s a good question.

Graham: Great question, I’d say.

Ashkahn: I would say most float centers offer retail. It’s not that common to come across them that have just nothing no retail.

Graham: You can’t see, but I’m making a kind of “uhhhhh” face that Ashkahn.

Ashkahn: Must have something, like at least like a T-Shirt.

Graham: So like about a year ago we did like random calls around the float centers. And we called about 50 of them. And of those over half didn’t offer any retail.

Ashkahn: No retail at all.

Graham: No retail.

Ashkahn: Interesting.

Graham: But that’s not to say that’s what you should do, that was just kind of the survey. So a lot of float centers don’t offer a ton, the ones that do to be fair, very, very seldom do you come across a float center that is offering a huge extensive amount of retail, or that’s selling a huge amount of retail. I’m sure that they’re out there, in fact, I know for sure there’s at least a couple, but they’re kind of few and far between.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so it doesn’t seem like anybody is making it a huge part of their business — like your retail is not covering your expenses or are contributing a huge chunk of change to your overall operations.

Graham: Yeah, and even at Float On, I’d say we do maybe an average of around $3,000 a month.

Ashkahn: 2,500, something like that.

Graham: Yeah. And that’s before we take into account how much the retail actually costs, of course —  the profits on that or are even less. We end up making maybe a little more or less than a dollar per float we run —roughly.

Ashkahn: If you’re just kind of assuming like 50% of the retail money goes towards the cost of the item in the first place. So we’re talking like 1,000, $1,500 a month is the money we’re making with retail.

Graham: And that seems to be kind of consistent again, when I when we talk to other float tank centers, others said, “I know, I’m a retail shops that just happens to have a float tank, right? Of course, they’re doing a lot of retail sales. I know one that has a roughly 600 square foot designated retail store area in the middle of their main float center. So they’re doing okay but, in general, it’s very sad, they’re not making that much per customer coming in.

Ashkahn: I mean that being said that’s 1,000, $1,500 we wouldn’t have otherwise and we don’t put a ton of specific effort into it, you know what I mean.

Graham: A lot of time is generous. Almost none at this point.

Ashkahn: Almost none. Our actual retail displays are okay, they’re not great really at all. Like we don’t really set up like great lighting really set them up to have a nice attention to different ones. We just kind of used the space we had in the furniture we had to have some retail out there.

Graham: And we’re not delinquents, or anything — we look okay.

Ashkahn: We’re responsible business owners. But yeah, so it’s never been like a big project for us to really get our retailers to be set up super well in the shop and to make sure we’re not like actively convincing our employees to be pitching retail at our customers or anything like that. So it’s a very passive sort of process that still brings us that amount of money in.

Graham: And it’s kind of hard for it not to be unless you plan. Again, unless you’re kind of base level concept for a float tank center is you really want to have retail and retail is a huge part of what you want to introduce your clients to and you believe in certain products or devices you want to be selling in addition to offering floats. You know again, it could be core to what you’re doing. The reason we haven’t thrown a bunch of time into it is just because the return on our floats is so much higher. If we’re going to spend time improving something and kind of getting more customers and getting more dollars coming in, it’s sort of a no-brainer, it’s worth spending the time on floats. And it’s not really worth as much time to spend on retail.

Ashkahn: Yeah if we doubled our retail sales, we’re talking another thousand dollars a month or something right.

Graham: Yeah, right. And if we added down like 5% to our float sales all of a sudden making a lot more.

Ashkahn: So I mean, that being said, it is nice to have retail. I like having it, I mean there’s just some cool stuff out there I want other people to have. So I think that’s nice having retail for my own selfish purposes of spreading information on things I think are cool.

Graham: Yes. So what kind of retail works? I guess like I said so we covered the do you even want to offer retail in the first place. So assuming you do.

Ashkahn: I’ll say a couple of things, here, before we get into specifics, actually. Just one more thing I’ve always thought about, with retail — part of why it’s difficult is because you’re just limited by how many people are physically coming into your store in a day, right? I mean like we running 24 hours a day with six float tanks can do a maximum of 60 floats a day. So we’re talking about 60 people walking through our doors a day at max, I mean maybe another one or two wandered in for something. And maybe like our mailman stopped by.

Graham: A dispensary or something came in.

Ashkahn: So, we’re just not seeing the sort of number of people that go through a shop that would be more focused on retail.

Graham: Nor do you really want to encourage more hustle bustle in most float centers, right? Like if your lobby was totally packed and you have people floating, I personally would be kind of worried about the noise coming in. So there’s a natural disincentive, almost, to having more people coming in off the street and milling about.

Ashkahn: So that’s that’s one thing about retail on the kind of bad side of it, and the one thing I want to say on the positive side is that even if you’re not necessarily making a huge amount of money off of it, there are other benefits to selling retail. I mean any time someone buys something from your shop and then they see it in their house, that’s just the time that they’re going to think about you. Or if someone asks about something and they got it from your float center that’s going to be the start of a conversation about floating, or it’s just a way of having those gentle reminders out in the world just by the fact that they bought it from your place. So there’s some kind of non-tangible or at least non financial benefits to selling retail out there, as well.

Graham: Yeah. And I think that’s especially true of things that are specifically float related to, right? Like books right, giant 50 pound bag of salt. Things that directly relate to the float tank — you know having a coffee book that’s related to floating is going to bring that more to mind then maybe just having a pair of color therapy glasses or something like that.

Ashkahn: So yeah, let’s talk about the specifics here. Let’s start with books because there’s a decent number of float books out there.

Graham: Right, and we sell a lot of them. So we might as well talk about them.

Ashkahn: I’d say our best selling products are these books that we personally publish. I mean so there’s a number of books ranging from John Lily’s books.

Graham: All of them, which I think there’s 12 or 13.

Ashkahn: And, how many specifically about float tanks?

Graham: So the Deep Self is really the most float tank-related book, and they get mentioned in a ton of this other stuff, even some of the dolphin books make reference to float tanks and things like that. But yeah, the Deep Self is definitely one, and Tanks for the Memories written with you E.J. Gould, is kind of the other one.

Ashkahn: And then outside of John Lily books, there’s the Book of Floating of course. So that one is probably the most like: here’s a book to get you from zero to some amount of information.

Graham: What we call the book of floating.

Ashkahn: So that one’s good, I mean we have a number of books created from our various artist programs at our shop.

Graham: Yeah, an art book, cook book, all that self promotional stuff, which we could go into.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah. So outside of those, Emily Norton’s book Unsinkable is good.

Graham: Yeah. That was exactly what I was going to say. So thanks for stealing that one.

Ashkahn: I’m sure there’s a few more little ones out there, but that’s that’s a relatively comprehensive list of float books you could have. Yeah. I mean there’s like James Nester, Get High Now, which mentioned float tanks in there. It’s like we’ve had that in the shop and it’s just a fun book to sell. So I mean at the end of the day none of these books are like flying off our shelves, right? We’re not we’re not like carrying an entire bookcase full of one of these books because we’re selling them so quickly.

Graham: We sold that, as well as Altered States.

Ashkahn: No, I’d say the Book of Floating sells better than Altered States does.

Graham: Which we also carry.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah. But really, if someone buys one of these books, that’s pretty much like in my mind the best thing you could sell somebody. It might not necessarily be making us the most money, but it means that that person is about to know a whole bunch about float tanks. So you’re basically selling someone an opportunity for them to go out in the world and talk a huge amount and very accurately about float tanks. So I’m always stoked when we sell float specific books. And I like carrying floats specific books for that reason. I mean even if they don’t buy them, they just know they exist and later get them from a library or something, you know what I mean, they’re doing their double duty of spreading information and spreading good, accurate information.

Graham: This is a good lesson. It’s books related to either playing around with your senses or human optimization that I find sell well for us.

Ashkahn: For us, for us. I think it’s that’s specifically to our center. I mean maybe we’ll take a little bit of history. We started with selling a lot of more spa like materials.

Graham: Towels and robes.

Ashkahn: Nice soaps, stuff like that. And it didn’t go well at all for us, and I think it’s probably because we don’t really have a very spa-like float center, like you don’t go to our float center and feel like you’re getting this nice pampered quiet voice babbling brook in the corner sort of experience. Like you come into our place, we’re like you’re here to float. The walls are bright yellow. And so, I just don’t think we weren’t giving that vibe, maybe we’re not exactly attracting that type of specific floater to come in. And so, our kind of more spa like products, they were pretty much just sitting there. They did not do very well.

Graham: And maybe it’s just that that’s the case for other floats centers that I’ve talked to have kind of gone that route too. But a lot of just float tank specific places that aren’t also wellness centers or kind of day spas,  it’s just a little bit harder to sell those things that you would see at your normal hairstylist or even against, spas or something like that. I think we have just a slightly different group of people coming into your average float tank center, again unless it’s sort of attached to a more general wellness practice or something a little more robust.

Ashkahn: I mean the stuff that does seem to have sold well is exactly what Graham was just saying, like things that I think mess with your senses. And yeah, I think there’s just overlap in the audience of like people finding out about floating and people finding out about kind of human optimization stuff.

Graham: And a lot of people who come in are either sort of sensory tourists, to get a sense of what the heck is going on in this sensory deprivation chamber, and then other people who come in really have a concrete problem like back pain or they want to work on themselves a lot and want space to do that. And I think finding products that are in line with both of those journeys for us has ended up going really well.

Ashkahn: Yeah. And for us specifically really the two products that have sold kind of better than anything are color therapy glasses. So those are the ones that have various colored glasses that you put on that kind of supposedly alter your mood based off of the color that you’re seeing through them.

Graham: And so, yeah, we have like ten different colors from the green and magenta and indigo to yellow and orange and things like that.

Ashkahn: Yeah. But they’re really fun, you come out of your float and you put them on, you look outside and everything looks weird and it just fun to play with on the spot. You’re going to immediately try them on and see the effects, you don’t have to like, take this home and you’ll in a week you’ll understand why this is cool.

Graham: And they’re relatively low price point. So it’s a nice just little add on, someone came out of a float, they put on some crazy pink glasses and they’re like, I love to wear these out on the street right now.

Ashkahn: And they look super fly, you look awesome in them. So those sell really well for us and then onto products. So the other things that sell really well relate to Joe Regan being a very big part of the Venn diagram between float tanks and nootropics, specifically.

Graham: Yeah. And I’d say Alpha Brain still sells better than any of our other ONNIT products, I believe. And so, the markup on those is not quite as good — just with supplements, in general, that’s often the case. So, those make the most revenue for us but the color therapy glasses make the most profit.

Ashkahn: The amount of profit you made per thing for some of those high priced items, like a 90-count bottle of alpha brain, is not a small price tag.

Graham: And ONNIT itself may be because of the Joe Regan crossover, but has been successful enough and we’ve tried carrying other supplements as well. But at this point, we really kind of double down on a lot of ONNIT things. So we don’t carry their full line of products, but a good number of them.

Ashkahn: Yeah. And you know they seem to do a good job of actually pushing people to buy things locally. So I think the list price is the same on their website but you have to pay shipping, so there’s kind of like an incentive for people to actually go into stores and purchase the products. So we get people who want to buy something, look up where to buy it in their area and then come to our float center for the purpose of buying on it rather than online.

Ashkahn: Which is interesting. I’d say some people definitely have discovered our float center because of that,. No one like looks up color therapy glasses and then goes like “where can I find these in Portland.” That’s just people discovering them as they come to our shop, but ONNIT will drive people into our float center. And sometimes that’s cool and they’ll find out about floating and they try floating. Other times, they don’t actually seem to really care about floating and they’ll literally come in and buy ONNIT and leave and we’ll never actually have them float, which is interesting.

Graham: Yeah, they’re like, “Ah, that was a cool art gallery.” Sometimes, people have no idea what we do.

Ashkahn: Yeah. That’s genuinely the only product we have that does that. We haven’t done a huge amount of experimenting recently, like grabbing new stuff and trying it out really,  but those two have always been pretty stable and successful for us.

Graham: Other things that we know that different float centers like, that we’ve either sold before or currently sell. We have miracle fruit Pills, which are awesome and convert your sour taste buds into sweet and kind of make everything that tastes sour sweet for about two hours, which is another one of those play around with your senses type things.

Ashkahn: Right. I mean other products we have we just recently started selling some water bottles that have our logo on them, like some of the swaggy stuff we have.

Graham: Yeah. A lot of self centers sell t-shirts with their logos.

Ashkahn: We did t-shirts that do not have our logos, which I really like. Back in the day we actually had artists come and float with us and then had them do t-shirts designs kind of inspired by floating, that didn’t have our logo incorporated or anything. It was just kind of sweet t-shirts and we sold those. And those are really awesome things to sell.

Graham: So kind of swag, I know hats and sweaters and things like that, hoodies, so kind of clothing in general for float tank centers. There’s the Colorado Hemp Honey.

Ashkahn: Yeah, they were just at the Float Conference and a lot of people heard about them there, and we just started carrying those in our shop a week ago.

Graham: Just recently. But I think within the last like six months there’s been a lot of other centers that have kind of started carrying those.

Ashkahn: Or some form of CBD honey.

Graham: Yes, CBD honey. I mean I’ve heard from other places that a lot of times their conversion on individuals floating to that pre-float CBD honey stake has been going really well.

Ashkahn: Yeah. And I guess that brings up the topic of food in general, we have kombucha in our shop that we will sell and we’ll give it for free to members. And we’ve had other food before to like nice vegan fudge bars and just kind of things that are on the decadent side of things that are really awesome to have after a float. And those have been cool, I mean they’ve been good in the sense that I think they sell better than the other stuff that we have, but they come with extra hassle in terms of storage and handling. And so, I don’t know, I guess we just never really put in the effort to make a big crack having different perishable things.

Graham: Also, whenever we’ve tracked very perishable sales it’s almost always our staff members buying them like they’re staff discount and that’s 80% of the sales.

Ashkahn: Eating fudge bars every day. So yeah, that’s true.

Graham: I also just I don’t know why this didn’t come to mind earlier but my favorite retail item that we sell, which I think every single float should sell and I think it’s hilarious is 50 pound bags of Epsom salt.

Ashkahn: Yeah, for sure.

Graham: And I think we just are the cheapest place to get 50 pound bags of Epsom salt because we don’t care, we buy it in such a- like we’re selling it centrally for cheaper than a lot of people get agricultural grade, which is crazy but you know we’re selling it for what $35 or $40 a bag. And people come in, like massage therapists come in will just come in specifically not to float but leave with two 50-pound bags of Epsom salt from us, which is always to me just the most hilarious purchase to make. So, if you’re not selling your bags of salt that you have sitting around, you are missing out.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Definitely, and you know, I’ve seen other places go as extreme as having like juice bars and stuff like that, that are part of their float centers. So it almost feels like you’ve got to get to that kind of through their extreme to really-

Graham: I’ve heard there’s those go really well too.

Ashkahn: I mean, it sounds great to me like having awesome juice coming out of a float.

Graham: We have a juice spot right near our shop called Kure, and I’m sure they just kill it with post-float sales over there. It does, it sounds like one of the best things you can have out of a float. So if you do have room to incorporate almost another service into it like a juice bar, that’s a cool thing to do.

Ashkahn: I mean okay, can I go back to my philosophy?

Graham: Yeah. Go back to the philosophy.

Ashkahn: Here’s my philosophy: I think it’s really hard to sell stuff that you don’t know about or care about and I think it’s really a lot easier to sell stuff that you know about and care about, even if it has nothing to do with float tanks, and that is almost more of a guiding principle than anything else because if you do something that you genuinely are like, “Man, other people need to try this!” I think it’s awesome. You’re going to be able to be in the shop and talk about it like that. You’re going to know what you’re talking about and you’re going to seem like you genuinely want people to have it. It’s because you do genuinely want people to have it. And we’ve done this before with this line of mushroom supplements that Paul Stamets makes. And they’re really cool, and we got really into them.

Graham: Host Defense, yeah.

Ashkahn: Host Defense is the the name. Yeah, and so we got really into learning about mushrooms and watching this dude’s talks and going to his talks when he came to Portland and doing all this research. And we started carrying their whole line of products and we were selling them because people come in and were curious. We would talk about mycelium. And we got really into it and people were buying it because of that fact. And then you know we stopped working in the shop and they-

Graham: They didn’t care about it as much.

Ashkahn: Yeah. It was one of my employees and they weren’t quite into looking into it or didn’t know much about it, and they pretty much entirely stopped selling. It got to the point where they were just sitting on a shelf and no one had sold one in such a long time and they were like “Should we just get these out of here?” And to me, that’s a really important lesson, you could sell almost anything if you care enough about it and if you have something that you don’t care anything about you’re going to have a tough time selling it, almost no matter what it is.

Graham: It reminds me of one of our friend’s stories about working in a call center. And he said when he was working there his desk buddy at the call center just decided to try and sell these little like screen rag things — one of his little goals was to upsell people on products, and one of the products was a little thing just to wipe down your screens. And within the course of a week he was like the best screen wiper salesman in all of North America, just because he mentioned it every single time. And so, yeah, if you actually go out of your way, you really can sell everything, even tiny little screen rags.

Along the lines of being passionate about what you carry, it’s a great opportunity to get your staff involved, both in terms of give out free samples if no one in your shop has tried something or doesn’t own their own color therapy glasses, they’re probably not going sell color therapy glasses that well. And similarly, almost all of our best selling products have always been a suggestion from a staff member, not out of our own heads. So we started listening to our staff and, when they were able to sell things they were passionate about, it went a lot smoother for us.

Ashkahn: Yes, definitely. And I just guess keep experimenting, adding new thing in as you find them. Take things out that are just wasting space.

Graham: Excellent and, as always, if you have any more ideas for show topics, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and type them in there and we’ll be talking about them sometime in the future.

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