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Sarah Curtis describes owning her own business and how it has affected her life.

Sue Johnson made a number of sacrifices in order to open her own business.

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Western Dairyland Community Actions offers information and advice for those looking to develop their own business plans.

Women-owned businesses in Eau Claire find success

By Ashley Dziuk
dziukaf@uwec.edu

After a car accident a few years ago, Sarah Curtis, said she became limited in the type and amount of work she could do.
           
“It became clear that I couldn’t work structured hours,” she said. “So I started selling items on eBay.”
           
With help from her father, what started on the Internet ended up being Eclectica on Grand, a small business in Eau Claire offering everything from antiques to jewelry to sleek home decorations.
           
Curtis is just one of the estimated 122,023 privately held, majority (51 percent or more) women-owned firms in Wisconsin, according to a study recently released by the Center for Women’s Business Research in Washington. Women-owned businesses are on the rise in the United States, according to the study, with a 45.1 percent increase in Wisconsin from 1997 to 2006.
           
Curtis added her business to those numbers on Jan. 13, 2005. She said she has always been a collector and comes from a long line of collectors and shop keepers. When she was a child, she had lemonade stands with lemonade on one side and antiques on the other.
           
She said she bought items for her ‘shop’ years before she actually had one. Her mom would ask her why she was buying stuff, with Curtis responding that it was for her shop. Her mom always responded, “But you don’t have a shop.”
           
“I am surrounded by things that I really love,” Curtis said.
           
Although Curtis and her father thought about opening several different stores, they eventually settled on Eclectica, she said. They are in the same building that was her father’s real estate office when she was a child, so it is the second time her family has owned the building.
           
“I’ve been very lucky with my family support,” Curtis said. “There would be a lot more problems if I rented from a different landlord.”
           
Also because of her family support, she had her own financing, she said. But she is working on getting a loan to expand the store.
           
Owning a small business definitely has its problems. Before the empty buildings on the street filled up with the children’s theatre and another shop, Curtis worried how the neighborhood would look. The footbridge crossing the river by her place used to be a main bridge, but now has cut the store off from downtown Eau Claire.
           
“A lot of people don’t know we exist,” Curtis said. “But there’s a real sense of community within the block now.”
           
Another problem with owning a small business, Curtis said, is the long hours. She works all day at the store and then goes home and works another five hours. The store also stays open later when they know people will be around, such as when the theater next door has shows.
           
“I never know what the day is going to bring, or what the shop is going to look like the next day,” Curtis said.
           
Even choosing the right inventory in order to compete with other businesses is a big responsibility. For example, she has some items from India because she saw a need for it in Eau Claire.
           
“I wanted to get things from different cultures,” Curtis said. “I know what I like and I see if I think other people will like it too, but I know quality.”
           
The base of her customers are women, she said. Because the customers are such a creative community, her stock must reflect that. She also has discovered a few niches in her merchandise, such as her belly-dancing items. People drive to her shop from Madison and the Twin Cities just for those items, she said.
           
“We’ve been very lucky,” Curtis said. “We stumble across items on a daily basis.”
           
She tries to stock her store with as many different items so she can appeal to as many people as she can. There is a call, she said, for her distinctive inventory in Eau Claire.
           
“I think people are sick of going in a department store and getting the same old stuff,” Curtis said.
           
Women tend to be in retail and service-type businesses which are often specialized, said Christina Thrun, a business development specialist at the Western Dairyland Community Action Agency.
           
“It seems women have very unique, creative ideas,” she said.

As a business owner and a consumer, Curtis said she thinks it’s important for people to know where their purchases came from. She tries to deal only with small and mid-sized family businesses when buying her stock. And, she tries to support local artists as well.
           
“I think more people are starting to take pride in choosing to be more responsible consumers,” Curtis said.
           
Because of her unique inventory, she said, she gets shopped out all the time, meaning other store owners come in from as far as Stillwater, Minn., to see what she has in her store.
           
“You can tell who they are,” Curtis said. “They come in and take everything in, trying to figure out where you got it.”
           
The price is another important factor in running a business. Because she is so frugal herself, she said she figures if she wouldn’t buy it at a certain price, neither would anybody else. So when she prices items, she figures out how much she would pay for it and then subtracts a dollar. “In case there are people cheaper than me,” she said laughing.
           
Although the economy is a little slow right now, she said her business builds a little everyday.
           
“We’ve had a lot of response, a lot of return customers,” Curtis said.
           
Sue Johnson, owner of Grand Central Stamping, opened her business in 2004.
           
Johnson said she opened the store because another stamp store closed.
           
“The timing was right, so I talked to my husband and I went for it,” she said.