By NICK STEWART
Like many would-be small business owners, the cost of setting up and maintaining a store long forced Timmins resident Jackie MacNeil to shelve her dream of owning an antique and collectible shop.
However, the unique open concept mini-mall, Branded Spaces, in late 2006 helped to make her dream a reality.
Sharing low-cost space with other like-minded entrepreneurs has helped MacNeil complete her first year in business.
“This place has allowed me to start the business (Relics) without having to buy a building or paying similarly high rent and overhead costs, so it’s great,” she says.
“When this came open, I thought that this was just the thing I was looking for, and it gives me the chance to open a new store without having to pay the big bucks to start up.”
Branded Spaces owner Kerry Newton says this is exactly the kind of opportunity she wanted to create for small, local entrepreneurs when she first opened the doors to the 4,000-square-foot facility.
In fact, having worked for various small businesses over the last 18 years, Newton says she’s strongly aware of the struggles faced by burgeoning entrepreneurs. This is especially true as Branded Spaces marks her first foray as a small business owner.
While working as a bookkeeper for a local funeral home in 2006, Newton came up with the idea of a low-cost, shared space for local business along with her friend Lisa Bryce, owner of Canticle, an event stationary and gift store. After securing a long-abandoned restaurant, Newton then recruited friends and family over several months to convert and renovate the location to a serviceable space.
As a result, the site is now specifically geared for such small local businesses as Relics and 13 other tenants currently occupying the location.
With a handful of exceptions, such as the multi-purpose conference room, most of the businesses in Branded Spaces operate without solid dividers or partitions: upstairs, a desk for the Young Drivers of Canada sits a handful of feet away from a rack of vintage clothing.
“In essence, it’s a mall without walls,” Newton says.
The idea of a “small business commune” is at the heart of Branded Spaces, as it allows the tenant businesses to equally share and benefit from the foot traffic passing through the downtown location.
Tenants can also choose to share in the cost of marketing, as well as the monthly costs of a debit payment system if they choose to use it.
“We’re not Wal-Mart, so you might not see 500 customers a day, but the ones you do see are people you can form a relationship with,” Newton says. “Also, they get to deal with a business owner rather than a minimum-wage employee, so it’s old-school business in a new concept way.”
This approach has already helped to foster explosive growth for at least one business. Branded Spaces has acted as a launching pad for Cattails Gifts & Home Decor, which outgrew its location at the site after 10 months and settled into its own downtown storefront.
While the site has a strong retail slant, other types of business have set up shop, including a day spa and a hair salon.
Even home-based businesses make use of the site: both a scrapbooking company and an event decorator have small unmanned displays. Newton says this allows this type of entrepreneur to have a public, retail-style presence, helping to remove the stigma sometimes associated with operating out of one’s house. What’s more, it provides them with a place to meet clients in a professional business location, she says.
Costs run from $99 per month for a display space -- “cheaper than running an ad in the paper every day,” Newton says -- to as low as $350 per month for a few hundred square feet of space. Aside from standard insurance costs, businesses need not pay anything else, as Newton covers the cost of heating and hydro.
Newton admits this kind of low-cost accessibility is not likely to make her rich any time soon, though she says the success of Branded Spaces has shown her the need for similar facilities throughout the North, leading to the potential for franchising the idea in other regions.
Instead, Newton says the success of her tenants is reward enough, alongside the recognition from the community in the form of the local chamber of commerce’s 2007 Nova Award for New Business.
“Seeing these businesses do well makes all the hard work worth it, it really does.”
