We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Perri Salka. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Perri below.

Perri, appreciate you joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

Hi! Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I’m so excited to share my journey with your readers. For context, I am the Owner and Curator of The WonderMart – a gift shop that exclusively stocks handmade items that are either made or designed in NY State. I formally LLC’d The WonderMart in October 2018 without a business plan or a nest egg of money to fund my idea – just a dear friend’s vote of confidence and a lot of hope and enthusiasm. A few months and a bunch of research later, in June 2019, I felt I was finally ready to take the leap! Without an initial injection of capital to get things off the ground I had to be creative. One day I realized I could work with brands on consignment (meaning I split the sale of an item with the maker, instead of purchasing their inventory from them via wholesale). In the beginning, with zero credibility, I knew I had to create a system to build trust with the makers I was reaching out to. I created a consignment contract, put together a google sheet to keep track of who I was speaking with and confirming and got to it! I scoured Instagram for local makers and to my surprise, I secured 25 brands within the first 30 days of my search, which would serve as my opening roster. I researched makers markets, filled out applications and got accepted into a couple and for the next 6 months, my husband and I would lug a bunch of bins filled with inventory and display pieces to various events around Brooklyn and Upstate NY on the weekends. By December 2019, I had completed 11 markets and my small Brooklyn living room was overflowing with colorful, handmade goods ready to be sold. Through this process, I had created a transparent, equitable system for supporting local, emerging brands and makers and I knew I had something worth pouring all of my energy into, in order to keep it going.

I thought 2020 would be a booming year for The WonderMart, but as we all know now, I was wrong. But despite all of the obvious devastation that COVID caused over the last 3 years – for me and my business, there were actually many silver linings. COVID allowed me to slow down and reevaluate what was important to me. I was able to work from home between 2020-2022, which gave me the flexibility to dedicate a greater portion of my time and energy to building my business. I launched my first online shop mid 2020 (since all in-person markets had been canceled) and to my delight I also got the opportunity to run a 1 month holiday popup shop that December (masked, vaxed and ready to make $$!). This pop-up unexpectedly turned into a 1.5 year experience running a shared brick & mortar shop with a friend of mine (she sold second hand clothing and I sold my WonderMart inventory). From this experience, I started to really understand what it would take to have my own shop and I started getting the itch to find a space that I could fully call my own. I was also fortunate enough to receive an EIDL loan during COVID for my business and that helped me hold on to some of my existing working capital and use it to grow my business. After a stressful 9 month search, I found a gem of a storefront in May 2022, in Greenpoint Brooklyn and I began bringing my ultimate shop vision to life.

With my eyes set on a September 2023 opening date and the help of my extremely handy and creative mom, we designed and built all of the display shelving and my checkout stand from scratch, which helped me significantly cut down on labor costs during the shop build out. Looking back, I somehow had exactly the right amount of money I needed to make my vision come to life (I am not inherently good at saving money, but I am getting better!). It all really just fell into place.

I still had a hybrid work schedule at my day job at this point, meaning I only needed to be at the office in-person two days a week. So when it came time to officially open my shop, I decided I would only be open Thursday to Sunday each week to start and I would multi-task from my laptop at the shop, taking care of whatever requests or needs my day job threw my way in between tending to customers. I was (and still am) willing to do whatever it took to make my dreams come true.

The WonderMart officially opened to the public on September 9, 2023. I decided to host a ‘friends and family’ community night at the shop on September 10, as a way to celebrate the opening of the shop with as many people as possible and I was lucky enough to receive some free press about the opening from a local publication called Greenpointers. That night was a MASSIVE hit. I rung in $4,000 in sales (a huge record for me!)… it was non-stop and I couldn’t believe I still had inventory left on the shelves afterwards. (For comparison, I was used to ringing in between $200-$500 in sales per day at the pop-up shop I ran the year before). On that day, I knew I had made the exact right choice to open up my own shop and from that day forward my shop has continued to grow month over month and the future feels bright.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was born and raised on Long Island and moved to NYC in 2005 to attend The School of Visual Arts. As a young kid, I enjoyed playing shopkeeper or grocery clerk with my grandmother, perhaps the first glimpse into my future in retail. I was also a budding artist from as early as I can remember…I was President of my grade schools’ Art Honor Society and painted several permanent murals in the hallways of my High School. As someone that has created art their whole life and attempted to make a living from it at one point, I have a particular empathy for others making a living doing what they love and so when I ultimately decided that being a full time artist wasn’t the right path for me, it felt natural to dream up ways in which I could support my fellow local artists and artisans in pursuing their own goals and that’s when the idea for The WonderMart first came to be.

While daydreaming of being my own boss, I spent 14 years working in restaurants (age 14 to 28) which I believe has shaped my approach to running a retail shop and how I interact with customers. But what truly got me to where I am today, is a mixture of good timing and hard work. As soon as I made the decision in my mind to start my own business, it’s as if something clicked. I like to say I took a leap and the universe caught me. Somewhere deep inside me, I found the strength and courage to believe in myself and just go for it! I wish I could say that I saved x-amount of money, I took x-courses, I read x-book…but none of that happened. For me, it was more about pulling knowledge from my various experiences and putting them into play. I am by no means an expert in all elements of running a business. A good Google search can open you up to a world of knowledge on those topics. I leaned into the unknown and made it my super power. Failure was never an option, but pivoting was. I had confidence in myself that I could always figure out a solution to a problem if I did enough research. When I launched my business in 2019, most people would say I did it on a whim. But in my heart, I knew I was ready for something BIG. I welcomed the challenge.

Fast forward 4 years – I juggle a full time day job and run my shop all at the same time… it’s not a path I would recommend to everyone, but when Covid allowed for a flexible work-from-home schedule, I took full advantage of it. This meant that I would be working 7 days a week. I am always shifting between my two realities which can sometimes be exhausting and I don’t have much extra time to spend with family and friends. But I feel as if these sacrifices are a necessary step I must take, something I must simply put up with, in order to build my business up to a point where I can fully support myself financially from it. I want my cake and I want to eat it too! When I am feeling particularly stressed, I remind myself that every minute I get to spend in my shop is one minute closer to making my dream a reality and one more sale I can award to a local maker – that keeps me motivated.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I have actually never worked a day in retail before opening my gift shop (hah!), so I didn’t go into it with as much knowledge and as many connections and contacts as some shop owners might have. I really had to build my reputation from scratch, one day at a time.

Since I work with brands on a consignment basis (meaning a brand gives me their product for free upfront and they get paid out for those items only as they sell), I knew from the get-go that I had to craft an onboarding journey for the brands I chose to bring into the shop that was transparent, equitable and communicative. I also had to prove to them that I was trustworthy – that I would keep their products safe and in good condition and pay them out on time every month.

When I was first starting my business and had to begin reaching out to makers on Instagram to build my initial brand roster, I was terrified that nobody would answer my inquiries. So I decided that my message would need to be concise, cheerful and informative – just enough to peak their interest. Long story short – it worked! I started my business with 25 brands, many of whom I would only get to meet by connecting over the phone or email. Some brands lived in Upstate NY and shipped me their product sight unseen! I was in absolute awe of that. Today, I share in success with 154 local brands and have a well oiled system for tracking my consignment inventory and handling payouts. Makers consistently praise me for how transparent and easy it is to work with my shop and to me that’s a HUGE win. They have enough worries as it is being a creative in this world and making a real living from that. So if all I do is make selling their products EASY (and fun!), then I have succeeded.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My father, Greg, passed away suddenly, one month after I started my business, in July of 2019. He was so impressed with what I had built and so excited about the business concept when I first shared my vision with him. In the past he had struggled to understand my creative endeavors and didn’t find much value in them. He felt that being an artist wasn’t the most logical path to financial freedom. We had many ups and downs together when I was stumbling through adolescence and early adulthood. When I started my business, at the age of 31, it was the first time I truly felt seen by my father. And then everything crumbled. His death really rocked me (for myriad reasons) and for a long while after that I struggled to deal with no longer being able to get his validation and approval for my accomplishments. The silver lining to this tragedy was that my father’s death also woke me the hell up to the finite time we all have on this earth. It was a motivator. So even though I truly had no clue what I was getting myself into, I continued to build my business one sale and one day at a time. I went through waves of sadness and sheer happiness every time my sales outperformed the previous month. I wanted so badly to be able to share my wins with my father. And truthfully I still struggle a bit with this four years after his passing. Life threw another blow at me when my only Grandparent, my maternal Grandmother Norma, passed away (also suddenly) at the age of 92 in May 2022, one month before I was about to sign the lease to my first brick-and-mortar shop. She was my biggest fan from the moment I was born and thoroughly supported my artist endeavors. She was so excited that I was opening a shop, but sadly didn’t live to see my opening day in September 2022. This was of course another huge emotional setback for me but through it all, I have always continued charting my upward trajectory. You could say I was doing it as a distraction from grief, but I was also doing it in honor of my loved ones. I know they are looking down on me and smiling – I know they are proud. So I guess what I am getting at is that through loss, I gained a resiliency within myself that fuels my desire to live a life filled with purpose and passion.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thewondermart.shop
• Instagram: shop_thewondermart
• Facebook: thewondermart
• Yelp: The WonderMart
• Other: Brick and Mortar Shop Location: 141 India St, Brooklyn, NY 11222

Image Credits
– Perri Salka Headshot Image Photo Credit: James O’Connor of Joc Pictures – Exterior Shop Photo With Perri Salka credit: Alex Melzter of Meltz Studio – All Interior Shop Photos can be credited to The WonderMart