Bumble Bee Soup Design Co. was started by two women in a small Wyoming town. Lovell, Wyoming is on the western edge of the Big Horn Mountains and receives considerable tourist traffic in the summertime.
The shop had two main assets, the women who started it. One, a proven businesswoman with a keen business sense, a growing multi-state firearms business, Wyoming Arms, and a building to house the store. The second, a woman with great taste, a passion for home decor, and a bit of fame due to her participation on a reality television show. These two ladies are special to me because they are some of the first to give me the courage to start my own business.
In my opinion, the largest hurdle for the shop was the small Wyoming town in which it opened. Lovell has a population of 2,400
My relationship with the store:
The store housed vendors who paid rent and those who sold items on consignment, but was staged like a boutique so that it felt like one unified shop. Because my second superpower is finding cool vintage pieces to sell or makeover into something awesome, I sold pieces to the store wholesale as well as consigning a few items. Bumble Bee Soup took 40% of consigned items, but they marked items up to a price beyond what I could sell it for myself. Therefore, 40% was painless. I never signed up as a monthly rent paying vendor because the store was 45 minutes to an hour away from where I lived and that was without snow on the road.
The following attachments give you real-life pricing and income from my business with the store.
Contracts:
Wholesale Invoices:
Disclaimer:
Every contract at every vendor mall is different and sometimes they change from year to year and vendor to vendor. Pricing can also be drastically different in other stores in other locals. This information is not meant to be a road map for your business but merely shared to show you the journey I’ve been on with Purple Monkey Manor.
