Virtual

After working 10 years in retail and running a retail store of my own for 3, I finally decided I couldn't do it anymore.

In July of 2019, we closed our physical store and transitioned to an online-only business.

It was bittersweet when the community, as well as my friends and family, saw the closing of the physical store as a failure, as if we were giving up.

I hadn't heard of Naval at the time, but if I had, I would have quoted him every time someone addressed the closing of the store with condolences and a somber tone:

"The hard part is not the learning, it's the unlearning. It's not climbing up the mountain. It's going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over. It's the beginner's mind that every great artist or business person has, which is you have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero."

I wasn't exactly hitting reset and going back to zero, though. I was actually more determined than ever to make this work. We rented a house - paid for by the business - and kept all of our stock downstairs. We lived there, let the team riders live there, let our videographer live there, and went downstairs each day to pack orders and take them to the post office. All of a sudden, our costs were low, sales were good, and I had 7 days a week back to actually ride my scooter - freedom!

Unfortunately, a brutal storm came through and flooded our under-house warehouse, and we had to move the salvageable stock that same week before even more rain came.

It was now time to try a method we'd been meaning to try for a long time - operating our online store from a storage facility.

Orders continued coming through the online store and shipping out of the new warehouse. The setup was efficient, streamlined, and all at an incredibly low cost with minimal time commitment. Again, Freedom!