When blogshops get physical

Generation Blogshop has come of age. While hundreds, if not thousands of garishly designed and brashly-colored blogshops have arrived and died, many online retailers have done well enough to venture into brick and mortar stores.

Tracyeinny, founded by cousins Jeannie Pang (check out SGE’s first interview with her) and Pamela Goi, can be considered a true online-to-retail pioneer. When they moved into their first storefront in Pearl’s Hill Terrace at the request of fans in 2009, the location was a ghost town.

“The place was dead, really.” says Jeannie. All they could rely on was their business savvy, and a whole horde of loyal fans.

The co-founders felt it was worth the risk however, since profits were already at a healthy level. And even if their offline operations bled, their existing business would not be badly affected.

In the end, such worries proved unwarranted since their fans flocked to the store like bees to honey.

About a year on, they outgrew their premises and the time came for them to move. While the rental cost was cheap, they could not renovate their store since the lease was renewed every six months, making tenancy uncertain.

“The landlords begged us to stay and even offered to cut our rent,” she says.

But sentimentality did not prevail. In 2010, they moved to their current location in China Town Square. Although a sleepy town at times, the workplace crowds hover in at lunchtime.

Jeannie says that their move into physical stores has paid off handsomely, with profit margins doubling ever since. They accumulated about $1 million in sales from January to May 2011, and expect revenue to hit about $4 million by year’s end, especially since they will be opening a new outlet at Junction 8 in August the same year.

That’s not too bad actually, considering that they were only generating about SG$600,000 (US$497,619) in annual sales before they got physical.

They’ve even managed to do it without passing any costs to their shoppers, since they have the sales volume. It’s only a matter of ordering more of a particular item to pump up profits and meet the demand.

While the women at Tracyeinny certainly did their homework and minimized their risks, a new game changer has arrived to shake things up in the Singapore scene. Their pitch: An offline blogshop aggregator that lowers the cost and decreases the pain for blogshops who want to venture into the retail space.

Meet Ng Chong Kee (left) and Jason Low (right), who co-founded KissJane in 2010. And yes, the company was started by two manly men in their mid-thirties.