Rare Device: Collaborative Retailing

Rare Device has come a long way since planting its baby roots in Park Slope, Brooklyn as a small retail space stocking soft furnishings, paper goods jewelry and accessories by independent designers. After developing a cult following on the East Coast, owner Rena Tom relocated earlier this year to San Francisco, California, and opened the second iteration of the store with partner, Lisa Congdon. The pair sat down with Behance to discuss successfully maintaining a cross-country operation, the necessity of risk-taking and the true meaning of quality partnerships.

Walking into Rare Device is one of those truly special experiences -- inherently welcoming and familiar, so it's no surprise that this is exactly what Rena and Lisa actively set out to accomplish in the first place. "Our mission is to create a space in which folks enter and feel instantly connected to the stuff around them. We like to see people looking at everything, feeling challenged, intrigued, even spellbound! We fill our shop with stuff that we connect to (and are challenged and intrigued by) as the owners. Fortunately, as partners, we have very similar ideas about what makes good design and what people will connect to. So that part is pretty easy for us. We are motivated by working together to bring beautiful stuff together and creating a space that feels curated (almost “gallery” like), yet not too stuffy. We want our stuff to be accessible, yet not run of the mill. When customers say “you have the coolest stuff in here!!” or “it’s amazing how you find all this amazing stuff and put it together so beautifully,” it makes us really happy. When we hear that we know we’re accomplishing what we’ve set out to accomplish."

Forward-thinking and brainstorming finds its place in a well-managed system, allowing the owners to make ideas happen. "We are constantly thinking about “the next phase” of Rare Device even if it’s something small like how we will reorganize the merchandising of the store for a particular season" or what kinds of new themed products we’d like to carry. So to do this kind of thing, we need to be good planners and list makers (and followers). We are huge fans of planning through lists and spreadsheets. We are both people who use both the right and left sides of our brains pretty equally, so this works well for us. The written plans help us to keep our insane creative ideas corralled into a manageable space, so we don’t lose our ideas as we generate them. At our weekly meetings we check in on the progress of our plans, cross things off and plan for next steps. Lisa has a background as 10 years as a project manager, so her experience in developing and following a coherent plan has been invaluable. Rena has experience in technology, so she’s helped to find us the right technology for managing our lists and plans. It’s not rocket science, but it does take time and diligence. Do we always follow through with every cool idea that makes it onto a list? No way. But are slowly developing a system for taking good ideas and moving some of them to the next level."

The team found a system which works for them, allowing the establishment of documents in real time to keep both stores running as smoothly as possible. "There are two of us running our business and we have four employees (two in NY and two in SF), so staying organized and in constant communication is essential. One tool that we use that has been enormously helpful is called our “store diary.” We use Google Documents through Gmail. Essentially, each store keeps a daily diary" - what is happening, what’s selling, what needs to be re-ordered or re-stocked, what customers are saying about the store, etc. We leave important messages for each other, and notes about what needs to get done each day. Each person uses a different color type. The diary is constantly “live” and is updated every few seconds, so we never miss a beat. If we [Rena and Lisa] are working from home, it’s a way for us to know what’s happening at the store and if we are needed for anything by our employees."

Aware of the need for constant change and innovation in the retail industry, they make time for weekly inspirational confabulation. "The San Francisco store is our collaborative effort. Each week we meet for three hours for a partner meeting.  In these meetings we take care of business, but we also bring all of our inspiration for store design and merchandising. Because our shop is all about good design, we have to keep the space looking and feeling new and fresh. So every few weeks we like to change things up. We bring magazine clippings, photographs we’ve taken around town and sketches of new arrangements or product ideas. We are both really creatively driven people, so this kind of collaboration and mutual inspiration is really important to us. We’d be bored and unmotivated if we weren’t constantly infusing discussion of beauty and good design with our discussions of paying bills and dealing with taxes."

Following their dreams and their absolute willingness to take chances has proven a successful combination for the duo. "We are both risk-takers. Neither of us has experience in retail prior to Rare Device. Neither of us has an art or design degree. But we had an idea that we believed would fly and we just went for it. We think in “over-thinking” stuff, people can convince themselves that they can’t make a creative endeavor happen. Our advice is obviously to be financially responsible, but to take risks; listen to what you want to create and make it happen."