This is another story of one of our oldest stores. Vladivostok differs from many other Russian cities in that it is reliably fenced off by the rest of the country from supplies *. This is the farthest edge of the Far East, here is a little bit more and Japan will already be.
The second feature is a very unusual city layout. It costs not only on the islands and peninsulas, but also on the hills. Read - flat cat cry, and most man-made. If you look at the map, you can first decide that these are two or three cities at least.
There are more features with the Chinese, surprisingly friendly atmosphere and military, but it's all ahead. For now, I will say that since this is the top ten store opened in Russia, the story is enchanting.
I will simply mark the places where, in my opinion, the store would have closed in normal life.
Beginning of the story
It all started with the fact that we actually did not want to open a store in Vladivostok. Because at the very beginning of the work of the network, we did all the logistics from the central warehouse, and had a rather weak idea how to take all this to Vladivostok, and how to control the point there. But here in our Moscow office on the threshold appeared Lev and Seryoga.
Lev got tired of working “for his uncle” - and made a willful decision to leave the company where he worked, starting with the students, and do something of his own. What - he did not know yet, so he came to Moscow and began to look at options that he would like and business partner Seryoga. The idea to trade nastolkami quite fit.
A month later, they were already looking for a place under the store and were waiting for the delivery of goods. At this time Olga Yermoshina appears on the scene - Levina's sister. She worked at an advertising agency, and he placed a large order for her - “make us a smart discovery”. She helped make some noise at the beginning and organized the first big free game store.
The problem was that the store opened later than planned due to the lingering search for premises and other delays. Specifically - in early February *. And our season is November, then the wildest December December (everyone needs cool gifts), January (everyone goes to visit and play on the table), February 14 and 23, March 8 - and further fall until September. It is necessary to open before the season, that is, in August, September, October or November. Possible in early December. But in February, this is a very optimistic plan.
According to Vladivostok, we wrote the history of the rake for internal instructions. More precisely, they, along with Samara and a couple more cities, stepped on all the classic newcomers' rakes. First they caught the off-season, then they miscalculated the delivery of goods to December and in the middle of the season they stayed with the store, where on each shelf were 4 games face to face *.
On January 3, the shop was closed on a shovel - inside was empty. Ordered the delivery by plane (it is wildly expensive, but allows you to somehow get the goods). He flew out of Moscow only on January 18 due to vacations at logistics companies, arrived on January 26. All this time the store was without goods. Young entrepreneurs brought their games, asked for games from friends - and forced the showcase with all this so that passersby would not decide that the store was closed forever.
After sending the order to the holidays, the guys reduced the balance and decided that it was a great experience, it's time to close *. Since somehow it turned out to repel attachments. Appreciated the next off-season, sighed - and decided to quit. And they even started the procedure of folding the point, returning the goods and placing the equipment at the Farpost (this is the local ad site), but Olga intervened.
She was so pleased to make game stores and generally download the desktop community in Vladivostok, that she decided that the store should work without options. But she had no money *. That is, the brother, of course, gave her the store with pleasure, but it was necessary to gradually return the money to him for the goods and equipment. At least. Plus somehow pay rent and salary, while all this is drawn out and goes to a normal profit.
Olya called Dima Soroka. He is a popular person in the city, a famous photographer in Primorye. Dima just bought games and shared them with friends and acquaintances — first at home, and then “wrung out” Wednesday night at a popular night club (most of the clubs in Vladivostok work in café format on weekdays). Since 2009, in Placebo (now the club has already changed its name) once a week they played everything that Dima had in the collection - when 5 people gathered, when 40 people - but they always gathered.
And so he joined the project. Together with the whole company of friends. In general, what amazes me Vladivostok is the history of how people can cooperate and do something together. A little later, I will tell you more about it. So far it is important for our history that an incredible number of friends Olga and Dmitry helped them with money for the supply of goods and the first time. Someone gave 20 thousand by the end of the month (delivery takes 16-18 days, plus a week of sales), someone retired parents put off on a vacation trip and saved up 70 thousand - and gave up until the summer - and so on.
If Lev came from a trading company and he had a strategy to stick to it, then for Olya and Dima everything around was an incredible surprise. The first question is where to get the seller. Seryoga, who helped Leva with the store, also decided to quit the job for good. Therefore, the first seller Nelyu was stolen in the local supermarket chain of children's goods.
“She was out of place there, tusila about nastol and offered them to people. Right from there and stolen. Then people started falling on us - they came. One certificate won, took, went out on the porch. Returned and said:
- Can I work for you?
Took then, of course. Two years later, it was stolen from us by a freshly built casino. Everything is fair - the cycle of employees "
The first place was in the shopping center "Gallery" (Dalpress). This is the first generation shopping center. That is, the covered market, in fact, is a good place to trade when you sell goods from India and learn about you on yoga. Very good transport accessibility, but in general there is no pedestrian flow *.
Then the sexual holidays were continued in a solemn atmosphere - while they decided to close, they did not order the goods in stock (obviously), and therefore there was a shortage in most positions *. In order not to close on a shovel - they were delivering the aircraft. Again, as many as 100 kilograms of board games by air over the whole country for space money - but simple is more expensive.
Little about the city
Now it's time to talk about the Russian-Chinese relations in retail. And in general about why Vladivostok is not particularly federal networks. The main reason is taiga and Amur, that is, if you do something, you need to do it from local components. Good near China. Driving from Moscow is not very justified. Therefore, from the well-known networks in the city only federal stores of cell phones and KFC. By the way, in China these “red colonel's mausoleums” turned out to be incredibly popular and even entered the traditions of the population (they celebrate holidays in their restaurants already at the level of the cultural code). We have long traveled to China for the weekend for the goods. Especially for Russians behind the Chinese border, the city of
Suifinghe grew up - there used to be a village, then a hotel and a market were built in it, then everyone began to buy Chinese goods there, and now this is a big city that has grown up in trade. Shuttles go there and just having a rest with advantage. Even there our compatriots are treating teeth. You can drive there for free, because you drag across the border someone else's bag with clothes for the shuttles. The procedure is the same: first, you are introduced to your new bag and its composition, then you come up with a coherent legend, why do you need 8 pairs of jeans and 40 identical bras.
The Chinese also travel to Vladivostok. Moreover, there are an incredible amount of them after 2014 (the fall of the ruble), but for us the flow to China has decreased.
Chinese guests behave strangely - for example, they sweep out all the gingerbread from stores (regular gingerbread, we also have them), take chocolate with sea salt and bird's milk. By the way, local bird's milk is boiled on agar-agar directly from the sea, therefore it has a much more delicate flavor. But for our story in all this two things are important:
- The Moscow network is valued here, and when they find out that a local resident owns a store, the feelings become close to love.
- For the Chinese, the red sign is a sign “there is ready-made food”, so they fly to our signs with terrible force. Right now we are translating the rules for them, by the way.
Why do we need to somehow understand the history of the city - this is to understand where the good places for a shop. The usual options are: first open on the street or in a large shopping center in the business part of the city, then take a shopping center with anchor tenants in the largest residential area, then look at the situation. Two shops on the city to a million should be enough.
On the right you can see the most interesting icebreaker.Vladivostok is divided into several clusters due to hills and islands. Here, take a look at the screenshot from Openstitmpeps:
Here it is clear that people live from Russky Island to airports on the continent, and settle down alongside the road. Here is the larger city itself:
Pay attention to the Golden Horn Bay, which just six years ago crossed the Golden Bridge. Before the appearance of the bridge, this bay divided the city into two almost independent parts: it was possible to live in one's own and not move for the second month. With the advent of the bridge, the situation has changed, but still these are two independent clusters. Accordingly, the first store should be opened in the center (north of the bridge on the map), the second in a residential area (south). And also pay attention to the residential area above the screenshot - it is Sedanka (more precisely, the area of stations Chaika, Sedanka, Sanatornaya, Okeanskaya, Sputnik, Sadgorod, Spring, Coal with the center somewhere in Sedanka), almost like a satellite city. Urban transport does not get there, there are their shops, their kindergartens, their doctors and so on. That is, you need three points ideally.
Residential area, view from the island of Russian
Take a closer look. But generally on sunny days Vladivostok is in the top ten in Russia.In 2012, when Olga received the store, they immediately began to look for a place in the center. At that moment, I was very lucky: Timur, who opened the first anti-cafe in the city, earned, sold a share to the co-founders, tied it in on time and decided to do something new and funny. He took control of the Navy department store - the old store of the city, something like the Soviet TsUM, which is in every city.
The first thing he found out is that the space is not used with maximum efficiency. And he began to look for tenants, in particular, offered a corner of 15 square meters. The rent was the same as in the old room (38 squares), but, as it turned out quickly, it was completely worth it.
The delivery made for a month is gone in 8 days. In this case, nothing at all did not do advertising, just moved. The thread is working.
Six months later Shoigu arrived in Vladivostok. After that, people from the department store immediately appeared and said that it was necessary to terminate contracts right now, because a paradigm was set: either to use the premises themselves, or to sell. “Six months later” is exactly December 27, 2012. That is, at the very peak of sales.
It was proposed to be on the street with the goods immediately *.
Fortunately, inhuman effort managed to stretch it all up to January 10. But parallel to the peak it was necessary to urgently look for a room.
The manager of GUM came out on Dima (this is the old pretentious former German store of Kunst and Albers uncles), the situation is excellent for us there - the tenants move out, but they don’t take the big ones because reconstruction is planned in the near future. It didn’t give a damn about deadlines, so we stopped at the ground floor quite cheaply. As one of the buyers, poetically described by Harry Potter’s closet under the stairs, described it poetically.
The second room was in the new creative cluster of Zarya Factory. Let me remind you, then the country was booming stories about the fact that the old plants should be given to young people for projects. If it turned out not to slip into the vapers rookery, then the Moscow Bottle or Winery was obtained. In the case of Vladivostok, the Flacon did not turn out, but the space did not rot: it just stabilized in some kind of average situation, when there is no celebration of life, and stagnation too.
It was important that before Dawn (this is just a residential area in the north, far from the center / on the border between the city and the suburbs), a completely different public began to arrive. People from the suburbs and nearby cities could make a detour before entering the city and not get into the city traffic jams. Prior to that, for many of them trips to the city were limited to the opera house. And people suddenly found out about board games. And they liked it very much, because they could sit and play with the guests in the good old style. As I have already said, Vladivostok is a very unusual city - they appreciate the good old style and are very cool friends. Not through the network.
Letters with pre-orders for the weekend began to fall. People chose the game on the site, and then drove behind it on occasion. This is also surprising: because of the distance between the districts, Vladivostok quickly became a network city, much faster than some cities in the central part of the Russian Federation (subjectively).
But conditions at Zara have deteriorated.
Further history of three more places. In the summer of 2013, after the closure of GUM for reconstruction, we drove to Posietskaya Street - this is the “half line”, that is, 50 meters from the most passable city street. A huge shield, a huge signboard and a panel-bracket in the street were immediately purchased. It's like to open 50 meters from the Arbat. Olga recorded the expenses on the panel and shield directly for rent, since she was not going to shoot them before the thermal death of the universe.
“Panda’s Workshop” after closing the store in Zarya offered the Ocean Cinema. Pandas are wild people who would make an Imaginarium and foil hats in Moscow, but in Vladivostok they stopped at mugs, T-shirts and postcards. Very cool.
They offered to stand at the cinema, the first in the city of IMAX. They already had a shop there, and a tenant search was announced for 8 square meters (which, thanks to them, ended in a couple of hours). We shared this gigantic square with the “Asylum 14” comic book store: a stand and 2 shelves with glass windows, on one end of the Mosigra, on the other asylum. In the mornings, asylum vendors worked and learned how to sell a desktop. In the evening there were ours, who could still sell comics.
Monopoly and other fairly simple games were being sold from the stand with insane speed. There, the city tasted absolutely cool "Answer in 5 seconds." It sold a lot more small goods than usual - after all, a man in the cinema already took money for a ticket and popcorn. And a little more on purchases of small and pleasant.
Unfortunately, the point had to be closed, since it generated almost as much profit as the minimum royalty rate for the store. But during the year of its existence, it pumped the traffic of the shop on Posiettskaya in such a way that it was decided to write off its rental costs for the same article as the signboard with the pointer.
In 2012, the new Cheryomushki shopping center was completed with a steep entertainment floor. Here we must stop and say that Vladivostok is developing in the retail sector with its own special atmosphere. Until now, there are places where you nahamy as in the grocery in the USSR. Shopping centers at that time were small, in the form of covered markets or bunker-tower type - that is, solid deadlocks. The natural interface, supported by an incredible bunch of Chinese people, is a regular market of the "crush" format. In the center, almost everywhere, the first floors are occupied by cafes or shops, so the trade is “smeared”. And in the midst of this opens a large modern shopping center with a huge grocery and a cinema on the top floor. And tenants are not chosen there haphazardly, but strictly for anchor and synergy, as is done almost everywhere in Moscow today.
And there they offered to call on the floor with a cinema. 25 square meters. But here the rental and the flow were incorrectly calculated, the shopping center for a long time went to a given attendance. In December, he earned a third less than the center *. The shopping center itself opened in 2012, and the mall began in 2015, when the cinema appeared. The opening with fanfare was September 9, 2016. That is, from 2012 to 2015, the two upper floors stood in concrete and were not used almost.
And at the opening did not work out with the furniture. The entire RC "Illusion Park" planned a magnificent opening for 20 thousand visitors (this is a lot for Vladivostok, say, weekly traffic). In general, everything is ready, just left to put the furniture. And suddenly the collector arrives and says - "There is no white chipboard in the city!" That's just not there. It turns out that the Eastern Economic Forum began (a state-level event). People who planned this event in advance, understood and knew everything, dropped an order for equipment 2 weeks before the start. Furniture makers simply swept out all the white glossy and white matt chipboard in the city. None of the local sellers were ready. The following shipments are September 12th. The official opening is 3 days earlier. With the help of the same resource of friendship, we found people who saw untouched white chipboard. He lay in the warehouse of the marriage, he was stabbed and beaten during transport. Three sheets of marriage went for one for the price. As a result, all the furniture is cut out so as to use whole parts: instead of 5 sheets, 11 were spent. But they did.
Another partner, a new franchisee Lesha and Natasha, opened at Sedanka. Posetskaya perfectly closed downtown. That is, there was a need for another point in the sleeping area, and the city would have been covered completely.
More about the city and people
Please note that almost every asterisk, which could mean the end of the store, is somehow resolved by the fact that people can unite and solve problems. Or find someone who can help. In Moscow, such a story sometimes takes on perverted forms of networking, when you don’t know, they call you somewhere because you want to, or because you control the budget. In Vladivostok, there is no such thing: people work together because they are just so used to living.
In general, the city is very unusual. There is in it something elusive of the wonderful openness of Ekaterinburg. There is a piece of such a bright Soviet future without unnecessary ponts. Here they celebrate the day of the tiger on the last day of September (this was suggested by the village teacher). There is a sambo monument on the waterfront in the form of two tiger cubs. There is a
coffee machine pit stop, which takes orders over the phone and does not require prepayment. Sellers bring their games to the store:
Buyers calmly play before a choice, without rushing anywhere:
There is a ZIL refrigerator in the local museum near the submarine, from which you can get the necessary addition to the game:
Maxson keeps records of fully played games:
There are typhoons and constant fogs, which the Japanese come to watch with delight. In winter, people go across the bay on foot and drive a car (“My grandfather got rid of the Urals like that”). It's just great. Here is the usual courtyard, for me - a symbol of the city:
And here they are ready to pre-order for 2-3 months and wait for him calmly. There is a whole book with games that are already going, and how they will arrive - they will immediately be given to the people who ordered them. That is, prepaid at a discount, and not just said that "we want." Therefore, even complex games are not laid here.
But let's about the neighbors.
Here is the cafe "Pie and Coffee" next to our store, the next door:
If you put a tray on a piece for cleaning, you will see an unexpected bonus (from other corners of this thing is not visible):
"You're doing great, take the meringue!"It is interesting because they have no sewage and water supply. Everything is done in two 25-liter flasks: one with clean water for a shift, the other with dirty water. In place only dogovka. Of course, they know in person all the guests. Of course, they know what and who loves. And, of course, they have cards.
Here, for example, for this store at the museum almost closed:
Ilya made it from Gracon Studio. As he says - this is a symbol of the fact that in Vladivostok are very, very beautiful girls. I can not argue with him. And they are in the studio doing unreal garbage all over the city.
Here is a number of comic book store “Refuge 14” (we have their shelf with comics, they have ours with nastolkov)
In general, something like that. More recently, Olga opened a souvenir and books shop at the museum of local lore and is also developing it. I hope they all will succeed.