5 lessons I learned owning a local lingerie store

In this post, I’m sharing what I learned from owning a local lingerie store in my hometown: why I chose the store, what the plans were, and what I learned from this business.

Hello friend,

This article will be fun, I promise. I'll talk about "My Boring Company". Elon Musk named his company "The Boring Company" and I think it's still active to this day. They build underground roads, or something like that.

I had my own boring local company. I wasn't digging anywhere. It was even more boring than that.

In this article I'm telling you what I learned from having a local lingerie store in my hometown.

Let's get it started:

Why this store?

There are multiple reasons why I thought of building a local store.

1️⃣ Diversifying and learning a new business model besides coding. You need some providers, buy and resell some lingerie and homewear articles. I'm not saying there aren't any secrets, and merchants keep learning during a lifetime. But if you're willing to do it, the entry barrier is relatively low.

2️⃣ I had extra cash from my other business. I didn't want to waste the money on a new car, or buying cloths or other junk. It's tempting to improve your lifestyle, but I was grateful for what I had at that time. Anything extra is not going to make me happier.

3️⃣ An extra source of income is always welcome. I had multiple options: invest in stocks, buy real estate, crypto or start other businesses. I was already doing DCA in EFTs, and real estate is not appealing to me at this moment. I wanted a small local store, not a huge one, since management is way easier, and I don't need too much cash.

Why lingerie and homewear?

Believe it or not, there were some pragmatic reasons for this:

1️⃣ They don't have expiration date. If I were to build a business of selling food or drinks, perfumes or other things, you might end up with many losses. You should buy fewer products at a higher frequency, but that means a bigger implication in the local store.

2️⃣ Going in the DIY, industry or gardening niche doesn't make sense. There are some big warehouses around here and I didn't have that much cash available. It's also a domain I know nothing about, and I'm not good at building things with my hands.

3️⃣ Clothing is difficult. I'm not a designer and don't really follow trends. Cloths get outdated so quickly and you should replace them with new products. There are season cloths and you actually need a huge warehouse to replace summer and winter cloths, for example. Also you have to buy whole sets, including all the sizes, and usually you end up selling M, L and XL sizes, and S, XXL, XXXL remain, and so on.

4️⃣ Lingerie and homewear somehow tick all the boxes. You could have a good profit margin, doesn't take that much space, you don't need too much cash at the beginning, some articles get outdated, but most don't, and there wasn't any local store within a range of 100km that had this variety.

What were the long term plans

1️⃣ Automate as much as I could. Being a programmer and building apps for others, I already had the knowledge to build my own software and automate all the processes.

2️⃣ Diversify and bring cloths. I thought if the store was profitable, I could also sell some cloths, and have a place where I can reinvest my profit.

3️⃣ Obtain better discounts. Initially, I started with a simple 80 sqm space, but I thought of renting a warehouse to buy more articles at once, which would lead to better discounts.

4️⃣ Start selling online. My plan was to automate everything, and once the local store functioned properly and the infrastructure was ready, start selling my products online.

But the reality hit

Following the same pattern we use for reviewing agile sprints, let’s discuss what went well and what didn’t. But let’s start with the ups ⬆️:

1️⃣ Profitability. The store started producing money within the first year. After paying the taxes, the rent, the salaries, the remaining profit was the equivalent of an average salary in this small town. Of course, we were reinvesting the profit, since we made money from our outsourcing business.

2️⃣ Learning the business model from the inside. We understood all the struggles that small markets go through. To name a few: negotiations is different than outsourcing and more difficult as a small store, finding great providers, how to set the price, and many more.

3️⃣ Paying salaries. We had 2 employees who were paid from the market, and we didn't have to bring money from home. This was so rewarding for us.

4️⃣ Being successful during lockdown. We had a huge satisfaction, since we made it work during the difficult Covid lockdown and that period of uncertainty.

No, let’s look at the downs ⬇️:

1️⃣ So time and energy consuming. The phone kept ringing at the worst hours possible. We had to handle all sorts of adjacent things, and we spent many evenings after the store closed fixing issues that appeared during the day.

2️⃣ Human error is a real thing. As business owners, and as developers, we (my wife and I) were used to checking all the little details. But the employees were not like us: they didn't understand how scanning and barcodes worked, they weren't deeply attached to our services, and many times they weren’t really paying attention or interested, which led to many issues that we had to solve.

3️⃣ Buggy software. The system we used for inventory management was so buggy. We had to use that particular one because it was linked to our accounting system. But it was a nightmare to use. The barcode scanner was breaking all the time. If the Windows computer was not shut down properly, the connection between the software and the database wasn't closed properly, and that stopped the cash register from working.

4️⃣ You had to show off. We were about 30 years old. In many cases, the local stores are family businesses where the owner is also selling in the store. Within our area, they are in the 40-50 years old range, or even up to 60. The distributers are in their 50s as well. So disrespect and trying to fool us happened daily. They saw us as 2 kids trying to do business, so we had to compensate a lot, sometimes raise our voices and impose authority. This sucked.

5️⃣ The market size. There wasn't a big enough market. But we didn’t know that from the beginning. We knew for a couple of years we were going to put in the effort, but after those years, we wanted some profit. We wanted prosperity, not survival. But that wasn’t the case.

Some lessons from this

➡️ Should you open a local store? Owning one in a small town is more suitable if you want a family business. It might sound interesting to you. If your parents are willing to help you and if you're not too rigid, that might be a viable option.

But keep in mind: family businesses rarely make huge profit. They are oriented toward being friendly, which in many cases transforms you into a people pleaser. Did you ever hear "We ate at this small tavern, we met the owner, and we had a great time"?. I'm not saying that's not rewarding and fulfilling, but he's not there for huge profit. You get the point.

➡️ What do you think about DIY? You can definitely learn some new skills. From woodworking to a learning how to replace spotlights, or how to create an extension cord, all are interesting things. Also you can tinker with the software side of it, automate the process or create several utility apps to help you with reporting and product management. There are many things you can do.

If you want to be 100% involved in the business, this might work. If you want to reinvest your extra cash and create a secondary income source, this is difficult to do. You might need to find a good manager to hire, and they are so rare.

➡️ Does clothing matter? This is funny. Steve Jobs wore black shirt and blue jeans. Mark Zuckerberg owned a Volkswagen Golf. Not sure if these are 100% accurate, but in general many successful entrepreneurs adopted a minimalist wardrobe. This happens especially in tech. In other industries, things might look different. It might also be a cultural thing: if you're not showing off, that means you're not successful. That's the mentality I dislike. I got discredited by people just because of the way I dressed and by age. I learned an important lesson here: stick to your values, and the people that might look boring and average might actually be really successful.

➡️ Are you wiling to spend more time on site? If you're into traveling, digital nomading or remote work, think twice. Owning a local store means you have to be there all the time. It's so difficult to leave more than 2 weeks. You have to watch your employees, place orders to restock and submit all sorts of papers to the authorities and to your accountant.

I thought I could automate the business and make it less dependent on me. The only way you could do that is by hiring a good manager. And as I was saying: that's so difficult to do since they are so rare.

➡️ Are you ok with the lack of structure? Having a background in tech, I got used to a more structured way of working. We have meetings. The meeting starts at 10:00. Not at 10:05, not at 10:10. I told the providers that I'm not available between specific intervals. They simply didn't care and kept calling during that interval. They don't deliver everything on time or send wrong products that you might have to return. From sticking wrong barcodes on products to miscounting how many articles of one particular model are left, all sorts of things happen. You can't even imagine. Computers do really well what you ask them to do. Humans, not so much.

In conclusion

Do I regret starting this? No. My wife and I learned so much from it. It was difficult, but definitely rewarding.

Would I do it once again? No. It was a valuable lesson, but trying once again at this moment in our lives doesn't make sense. We want something more dynamic and fully remote. And we're also busy with our collaborations and projects in tech.

If this story inspired you, let's have a chat about it.

Also I'm thinking of writing a post about my other sources of income and where I invest my money now. I'd like to hear your feedback and your questions.

These are a few places where you can find me:

👉 I'm most active on X/Twitter: https://x.com/razvanmuntian

👉 Checkout my LinkedIn account as well: www.linkedin.com/in/razvanmuntian

👉 Or if you prefer Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/razvanmuntian

👉 My personal website:

https://razvanmuntian.com

Thank you so for reading this post and I hope it's been inspirational!

See you soon!