We were lucky to catch up with Cheyenne Licari recently and have shared our conversation below.
Cheyenne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.
Licari Boutique started as a fun side hobby as a chance for my best friend and I to work together and get more quality time with our kids. What started as a fun hobby quickly scaled to 3 store fronts in under a year as well as a mobile boutique. We started in a small 1200 sq foot building in a great location (a Walmart plaza) we knew location was everything even if we wanted the business to be small to make money doing anything location is always key. Having a great location gives us visibility to customers but we knew if we wanted to stand out we had to be a “different” kind of boutique meaning we cant just sell women’s clothes there were already 5 or more boutique in our area and many ppl thought having another boutique would either fail or over stature the market so we came up with a unique business plan, We started by offering women and children’s clothing at affordable prices we wanted moms to be able to shop for themselves and also get a cute outfit for their kids without breaking the bank. So began our slogan “Boutique quality without the boutique price” I believe what most ppl focus on in this economy is price and a lot of boutique only sell higher end items which is great if thats the clients you want and what works for you but what Tori and I wanted was to make people happy feel confident and not have them worry about what the price tag was going to say when they turned it over, Having quality pieces at affordable prices was not easy because even whole sale prices can be high plus you have to have a high enough margin to still cover the cost of your overhead this meant we had to have limited stock of items meaning we couldn’t “sit” on pieces or run deep discounted sales. Once we found vendors we liked and trusted getting quality pieces in at affordable prices for not only us but the consumer we also decided we have to add more than just boutique clothing so we started out t-shirt business inside of the store to offer even more variety. Tori (my general manager and best friend) really is the vision behind the store i myself am not and have never been very creative in the way of making items actual crafts or designs but Tori has always been able to create beautiful designs and learn any time of machine and software to create the designs. Tori had been doing sublimation for years as a side hustle on her own and was something she loved and was passionate about. So we took Tori vision and creativity and we started our own clothing line carrying sublimation bleached t shirts with funny says like “fueled by anxiety and iced coffee” or “in my plant lady era” and the best part was customers could order a specific t shirt from us they could pick the design and color of t shirt they wanted and we could make it in store and either ship it to the customer or pick up in store. People love this we saw an uptick in sales when we added t shirts along side of our women and children’s boutique clothing enough so that Tori and I were able to make this our full time job and in as little as 6 months we outgrew our first location and moved from 1200 sq ft to 4800 sq ft just 5 spaces up in the same plaza we originally started in. However, bigger space means bigger cost so once again we looked to our business plan and said “how can we be different affordable and what going to make us stand out from the rest. We moved our store and within one week had it up and running we were lucky to move in November which if you know retail you know is one of the busiest time to start selling so we took full advantage and invest in a DTF print machine which was higher quality of or sublimation machine and was able to make shirts at double the speed. We were making custom crewnecks, t shirts and children t shirts all winter long are also now next to TJmax in our plaza which gave us double the foot traffic that our old store did even just five doors up! As we were growing we noticed we had a lot of people that were out of town or from almost 2 hours away and sometimes further ordering clothes from us we saw that as even more opportunity. We took our boutique and added out mobile boutique into the mix my sister Sierra is a people person who loves to travel so when I tell you this is her dream job she never hesitated to say yes to work with us. Sierra started taking our clothes all over the place we went anywhere from Pittsburgh 2 hours away to Virginia Beach 5 hours away the more our name and product got out the more orders and foot traffic came through the door we were invited to pop up events and conferences to showcase our items and talk about why we were different. My sister literally gets paid to travel sell pretty clothes and talk to people all day she’s in heaven! With the travel and being invited to pop ups we met so many amazing women in business and even partnered with a few which is how our other 2 locations came about. First we were invited to Tyrone a town that is about 20 minutes from our original location to do pop up at a coffee shop called “The Brew” and let me tell you that coffee shop loved having us and we loved being there with them we made friends with the owner an staff so quickly it was always so fun to not only helped grow our sales but gave the coffee shop more exposure creating more revenue with them after a few pop ups the own reached out and said she was part of an improvement group in her town an if we ever thought of expanding that the town would love to have us and she would even help find a location. Well i have adhd and let me tell you when i say i dont think i just do thats exactly what happened I texted the owner back and said great lets find a place id love to be apart of it and help improve the town with events. Within 2 weeks we found a location paid the deposit started remodeling it and now have a Tyrone boutique thats about 1100 square feet in the middle of town. We get to be front and center for all the towns events and across from our coffee shop friend. We are also along side a major highway which is great for billboard advertising purposes to lead people into the town for shopping and Coffee! Speaking of coffee (can you tell i spend a lot of time buying coffee its what keeps me doing everything lol) one of my now other wonderful friends who i never would have met unless i started this journey also owns her own coffee shop about 15 minutes away from our original location. Ashlyn is the owner of coffee on third in Duncansville and was one of the first places that we started doing small pop up events at when we started the traveling boutique. Ashlyn’s coffee shop is her own unique design and style so we hit it off right away and became friends very quickly! While we were set up in her shop she noticed we also make custom shirts and after a few discussions we now make Ashlyn’s employee clothing as well as have a small rack inside of her shop that we make only custom for Ashlyn’s customers its unique to her shop and something that makes her stand out from the rest and her customers love getting to buy her custom made merch when they come in to get a coffee! Ashlyn like Tori has a very creative mind and started what’s called the backyard project at her coffee shop in town she has essentially created a little shopping village that has large she sheds for company’s to sell their product out of right behind her coffee shop. She has everything from donuts, baked goods and you guessed it Licari Boutique has their own little shop in the back. April 1st of 2024 officially marked our 1 year in business in that time we have created 3 adorable locations 1 traveling boutique and are now starting to host our own events inside of our store. It took a lot of hard work late nights thinking outside the box but its all worth it and we aren’t dont yet we are always looking to expand and grow and help other business is 1 year down and many more to go.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
Face to Fae marketing is still the top way to earn peoples business not everything is social media despite what the masses say Read the book the power of 10x its a great business book
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Find new ways to reach audiences sitting behind the desk will not lead to sales Plan for failure always even if you have a full proof business think if the unthinkable and come up with a backup plan
Don’t get so comfortable that you stop learning new things to improve
Contact Info:
- Website: [email protected]
- Instagram: Licariboutique
- Facebook: Licari Boutique