I turned on paid subscriptions at the end of last year—thank you to all who pledged support! I thought I would kick off 2025 (in February, hah) by giving you all a more structured idea of what you’re going to get by staying subscribed to Storefront Revolt, or upgrading to paid, this year.

This year, Fernseed will turn six. I was remarking to a friend that it finally feels a bit like I can take my hands off the steering wheel, like we cleared the launchpad and are entering into orbit. (Knocking furiously on wood, spitting, etc. while saying this.) This means I do not have to have a knee-jerk reaction to everything that happens in the business, because we’ve dealt with so much already. I know the territory. I know whether or not it matters, and truthfully, not much does.

During our six years in business, some of the only things that have had major, sustained impacts on our expenses or sales have been:

• COVID-19—closing our storefront for 2 months, the EIDL money, and not laying off our 4 staff members at the time we were forced to close like I should have

• People’s deep interest in house plants as a trend, which peaked in 2021 when our sales reached nearly $1 million in a single year

• Building a website that allowed people to order from us online for local delivery

• Being overstaffed (spending too much on payroll) because I didn’t know how to property carve out job roles in a business or delegate tasks to a single manager

• Rent payments (price per square foot)

• Opening a second location in 2020 and selling flowers in addition to plants (now 40% of our business and growing)

• How much inventory we kept on hand, compared with monthly sales

• Incurring debt that accrued so much interest it wrecked my cash flow and almost tanked the business

Notice how all of these things are super high level? It doesn’t really matter if we post on Instagram every day or twice a week, or if we have a slow week because it’s snowing. After 6 years in business I know most things come out in the wash. It’s a weird place to be because I’m still prone to agitation if a display looks messy, although that’s happening less and less these days. Knowing how high level everything truly is gives me the mental fortitude to shrug off a slow sales day, and there are many. I have to force myself to look at everything in the aggregate, and doing that is part of what has kept me in business.

I witness so much panic among my fellow shop owners and I understand why. We just went through another wave of closure announcements at the end of January. Wild fires, looming tariffs, the price of eggs, total economic uncertainty… it’s just too much for shop owners who, I’m certain, aren’t taking a huge paycheck from this work or building much in the way of equity. And that’s part of what I want to talk to you about this year.

I want to take you through the story of me trying to purchase the commercial building Fernseed is in last year, as well as another potential commercial location, and the details on why it was not possible to finance either purchase, even though we had a substantial down payment. I would like to further explore the reasons small business owners are locked out of property ownership, and research whether this is a growing trend. I believe it is. I believe that 40 years ago, a larger percentage of small shop and restaurant owners owned their buildings as well as the businesses, and that’s part of why they had longevity. Owning the building meant they were always building equity, even on slow sales days, and that’s why they stayed in business.

This year I also want to take a deeper look at all forms of equity for small business owners, including selling their businesses, and how, again, these forms of equity are (probably) diminishing, making small shop ownership as a way of life increasingly untenable.

Last week, the last remaining plant shop in Tacoma announced it was closing, and my friend and former manager sent me a text. “How does it feel to be the only plant shop in town?”

“Like the Hunger Games,” I replied.

This year, I want to tell you the reasons I think I am still surviving out here. Spoiler alert: less than half of those reasons are me making smart business decisions. I’ve spelled it out before and I’ll spell it out again: if I didn’t have my partner’s income to rely on for all our household expenses, I would have had to shut down Fernseed at the height of its debt liability and go back to full-time work. Most people are too ashamed to tell you they can only afford to run their business because someone else pays their bills, but if this is the case for more than half of us, we have a systemic problem. I believe people used to be able to earn a living running a small shop in their town, and I am hoping I can research how, and why, that’s changed. Then maybe we can hope to do something about it.

But I do want to dig in to the reasons I haven’t gone out of business that were in my control, the things I changed to go from two straight years of loss averaging $100,000 to a very narrow profit last year. And I will share with you the metrics I am currently monitoring (12 in total) that are really the only thing I track in the business, knowing not much else makes a difference.

If you’re a paid subscriber, I will dig deep into those metrics with you, sharing real dollar amounts and sales figures. Over the next year I’ll share a detailed, inside look at how I went from losing money every month to making a tiny profit, and what I’m doing to try and keep things that way. As part of that work, I’ll share how I am slowly, slowly chipping away at a scary amount of business debt. Paid subscribers will see exactly how much, and how long it should take to repay.

Finally, this year I am going to try my best to research this idea of business “Blue Zones,” my hypothesis that there are geographic areas and a set of factors, similar to the factors that allow people to live to 100 years of age, that define independent storefront business longevity. This list might include things like the presence of a strong local economic development organization, average cost per square foot of commercial space versus average sales per square foot, zoning laws, cost of living, or availability liquid capital, to name a few. I think the first step here is to identify how to structure the research, so that is what I’ll share with you this year. (Also if you’re a grad student looking for a city data or placemaking research project or know someone who is… email me?)

I firmly believe that we are living in a landscape that makes it more impossible than it ever has been to successfully operate an independent storefront business, and that we’ve also unwittingly created a vacuum of real community support for those who attempt it. Without solidarity, those businesses will remain isolated, with no lines to connect the dots of universal experience like low compensation and mounting debt. If we don’t speak up about what we are experiencing, no one will know it’s happening, and no one will ever know what to do. Then all the storefronts will be empty, except for a real estate office and a cell phone store, and we’ll wonder what happened to the places we used to call home.

I’m not writing because I think I have the answer. I am writing because I am willing to share my detailed numbers and a very strong hunch that something is amiss, in the hopes that anyone reading can use the dots I’m throwing out there to make bigger connections.

I appreciate your continued readership and support, and as always, please reply to this email if you have thoughts on any of this you’d like to share.

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