Niche Store Owners Have Lean Beginnings but Rally Through

Specialty stores, sometimes known as niche stores, take years sometimes to become solvent. These sport specialty shops illustrate what it takes to overcome the lean start-up period and find opportunity in the strangest of places.
Oregon's Smoked Monkey, snowboard shop was opened to give snow-boarding families a place to go.

Owner Gloria Wright had no retail background, but used her contacts at the school district where she formerly worked to promote her shop as a shop for families, not for snowboarding adults who wanted to sit around and sell dope. Her reputation for being a safe haven for families grew and now she even has a buy-back program where old snowboarding equipment can be turned in for larger sizes.

Bikes Plus owners Mary Ellen and Dick Spirek opened their shop in an Illinois suburbs on borrowed money. Times were so lean that they couldn't even afford juice for their children and in less than 20 years they had several stores run by their children.

Other stores profiled managed through similar lean times and through hard work and determination have turned their niche ideas into successful sport specialty stores over the years.

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