Since opening Sticky this spring, we’ve considered two opportunities for additional space, one downtown and one near our store on St Clair.
Andrew and I talked both opportunities through, and for a number of reasons, we didn’t move ahead with them.
Although we are open to expanding our physical space in the future, for now we decided that the best approach is to increase revenue through marketing rather than through square footage.
Having more stores of course means that a business gains customers but this is also achievable by investing in online marketing including social media and Google ads, email campaigns, and search engine optimization.
What I’ve found interesting is that the price tag of a significant marketing campaign took me longer to accept than the price tag for space and the resulting buildout costs.
Even though leasing space in Toronto is really expensive – and construction always costs more than you budget – it somehow feels like more of a “sure thing” to open a new store than spend on online marketing that will most certainly reach tens of thousands of potential customers.
But I’ve learned that an attachment to bricks-and-mortar is a good thing for a business owner to question, and maybe even more so post-pandemic. Between March of 2020 and now, we all know that physical retail operations were closed on and off for months and still now many office workers remain reluctant to return to physical office space. This means that connecting with potential customers through everyone’s ubiquitous phone is a viable strategy. This is especially true when a company has a robust online ordering system, as Sticky does, and the company is willing to invest in continual improvement of it.
We are excited to start the marketing campaign over the next couple of weeks, and we’re committed to staying the course with it for a number of months.
Please stay tuned here as to how it goes: I will certainly be sharing what we learn about launching a significant online marketing campaign.
