We recently connected with Richard Barrette and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Richard thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Leavenworth, Kansas, is a small town northwest of Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri. It is the first city of Kansas, with a population of 37,000 people. The biggest industries in this area are the military at Fort Leavenworth and the six area prisons, including the infamous Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. The downtown area is filled with small shops, restaurants, and small businesses. It is here that my wife and I decided to open up a small, gently-used clothing store.
I didn’t come up with the idea for running a second-hand clothing store. That was my wife’s idea. Melissa is a civilian analyst for the US Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I was quite content being a twenty-year veteran stay-at-home, homeschooling dad and former high school English teacher. Our children had the audacity to grow up, graduate from school, and move on with their lives. That put me out of a job. I was preparing to return to college to take a few classes in order to earn a Kansas teaching license before returning to the classroom. Then Covid hit, and the current administration threatened to fire any government employee that did not get vaccinated. Agree or disagree, there are a great many people in this country that are not comfortable with taking the Covid vaccine. My wife is one of those people. It was a terrifying position to be in. We have a special needs daughter. My wife carries our health insurance, and earns a far better wage than I ever could as a teacher. Faced with the prospect of losing her job for refusing to take the vaccine, we looked at alternative employment options. She has always wanted to own a small business. We decided to go ahead and start a business even though we did not know whether or not she would keep her job. If she lost her job, she would work at the store and I would return to the classroom and teach. If she kept her job, she would continue working and I would run the store. So far, the latter has taken place.
My wife noticed, both while driving through Leavenworth, Kansas, and in speaking with parents in our community, that there were no stores aimed at serving youth. That became our focus. We would sell new and gently used clothing aimed at teens, tweens, and twenty-somethings: graphic T-shirts, jeans, hoodies, and formal wear for the girls who attend multiple dances each year at our three area high schools. We also sell shoes, sweaters, jackets, and purses. There are some quirky items that we’ve sold based on a hunch, such as Pokemon plushies, a stuffed Scooby-doo, and a Yo Gabba Gabba backpack. Because of our proximity to area hotels and the visitors to Fort Leavenworth, we carry some tourist items, along with impulse purchase items such as earrings, pins, key chains, funny magnets, chocolate, and stickers. Oh, my goodness, do stickers sell! My favorite products that we sell are those made by PawAbilities in Olathe, Kansas. That organization provides job skills training to special needs adults. We sell their dog biscuits, chew toys, pull toys, and bandanas.
We opened in March of 2022. Within the first month of operation we learned that our demographic is women in the 35-60 age group. I’ve sold more jeans to women in their sixties and seventies than I ever imagined I would. Moms find our store, drag their kids in, and tell their friends. Our big surprise was all of the officer’s wives from the fort who need dresses for military balls. They don’t want to drive thirty minutes to Kansas City and spend $200-$300 for a dress when they can drive five minutes from the fort to our store and buy a good quality, gently used dress for $60-$100.
I don’t think there was anything that got us particularly excited about starting t
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We want to provide each customer with old school customer service in a funny, friendly manner. That is never more apparent as in our name. We went through twenty different possible store names before arriving at The Cheeky Llama Clothier. Oddly enough, the name started with a weather vane. A few years ago, we needed to replace the weather vane on our house, and after searching for the perfect one, we chose a llama. It was quirky and fun. Fast forward a few years, we found ourselves discussing store names. Thinking of our weather vane, Melissa suggested something with “llama.” We played around with adjectives until we found one that made us laugh: The Cheeky Llama Clothier. The name makes people smile. We almost purchased a flying pig weather vane. That certainly would have given our store a fun name! When people walk through the door and hear, “Welcome to the Cheeky Llama!” they usually laugh. Every customer is greeted when they walk through the door. Every customer is thanked for visiting whether or not they make a purchase. We try to laugh as much as possible in between.
Some customers call us a thrift store. Others call us an “upscale thrift store.” Those titles make Melissa bristle. Our store is clean, very well organized, and doesn’t smell like fabric softener, the preferred scent of thrift stores everywhere. In fact, more than a few people have commented, “It doesn’t smell like a thrift store,” when they walk through the door. We are simply a store that sells new and gently used clothing at an affordable price. In your average thrift store, customers are looking for a diamond in the rough. You have to sort through a lot of stuff to locate good quality items. We offer only clothes in “like new” condition. We do the searching for good quality for the customer. We offer a store full of diamonds and the let the customer choose the karat. Since there are a lot of low income families in Leavenworth, they save a lot of money shopping at our store, and are still able to wear clothes that look like they shopped at more expensive stores in Kansas City.
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?
Early on, customers frequently asked where our store t-shirts were. Did we sell something that had our store name on it? Unfortunately, we didn’t. Our store was self-funded on $10,000 from our personal savings. There wasn’t room in that limited budget for “The Cheeky Llama Clothier” t-shirts. We decided to start small, with branded stickers.
We have a large llama sticker on the store’s front door. It is three feet tall and narrow, consisting of the neck and head of a llama. That gave us the tag line for our advertisements: “Llook for the store with the llama on the door.” The sticker was developed from a picture that I took. Melissa reduced that picture in size, added our store name underneath it, and sent it off to a sticker manufacturer. After we approved the proof, the manufacturer emailed us and asked if we wanted a white border around the sticker. “Why not?” we asked ourselves. Huge mistake. When the stickers arrived, Melissa opened the envelope, pulled them out, and screamed, “Oh, my God! It looks like a penis!” You have to see it to believe it. The white outline made the sticker look exactly like an erect penis with a smiling llama tattooed on it. It was a hundred dollar mistake, and it couldn’t be undone.
Now we give those stickers away for free to anyone who is brave enough to display it on a car, laptop computer, water bottle, etc. We’re putting up a map in our store with pins in the locations where our stickers have traveled. We have these stickers in fifteen cities in eleven states, and on two US Navy vessels that shall remain nameless. Almost everybody has a laugh at our expense, but we turned our mistake into a funny marketing gimmick. We’ll reorder these stickers when our current supply runs out.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Our only daughter and youngest child was born with a congenital heart defect. At age four months, she suffered a heart attack, a stroke, and she died. Successfully revived and placed on life support, her heart was repaired and she eventually returned home. Her entire life has been doctors’ appointments, therapy appointments, and trying to live life as normally as possible with her deficits. It was an experience unlike anything for which Melissa and I were prepared. It put all of life into sharp focus. We learned very quickly what is, and more importantly, what isn’t worth worry about, or fighting over. Absolutely nothing about owning and operating a store comes remotely close to the experience of raising the blessing that is our daughter. The worst that can happen is that the store fails and we’re out $10,000. That would be disappointing, but certainly not life-threatening. Having the proper perspective is everything!
Contact Info:
- Website: http://cheekyllamaclothier.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cheekyllamaclothier/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CheekyLlamaClothier/
Image Credits
Richard Barrette