2023 was at the same time Little Deer’s 5th year, 3rd year and 1st year.
Our 5th year as a business (started selling in markets in 2019), our 3rd year in retail (opened our first pop-up in 2021), and our 1st retail year in one place (we moved multiple times in 2022, exhausting! I highly recommend staying put!)
LINE GOES UP
On a whole, we did better than previous years. We sold more books and more money traveled through us (I hesitate to say we made more money because my bank account is still empty, ha). But with doing more came a lot of growing pains and amateur-hour mistakes that I’m trying to learn from in 2024.
The main challenge I ran up against repeatedly in 2023, especially from the summer onward, was balancing the buying against increased demand. People wanted a lot more books from Little Deer, which is good! But since book margins are very narrow, it's difficult to scale up without overwhelming our budget.
In 2023 my weekly buying budget rose from €200-300 to €400-600. On average it costs me roughly €10 a book, so that's us going from 20-30 books a week to 40-60 books a week. Those are little league numbers in the world of bookstores but huge for us.
An unexpected side-effect of increased buying is that way more of my week is spent logging books now than before. What used to take me 2-3 hours now takes me 2-3 days to get everything onto the webshop (online sales passed 50% of our business this year!) When the number of books coming in rose even higher towards Christmas I ran out of time to read any comics myself!
There were tons of new releases (more than previous years? Or maybe I was just more aware of the sheer amount of book releases?) and customers were requesting a lot more books than before, both new release and restocks. As a result of the new releases and increased requests, Little Deer ended the year with a lot more "staples," books and artists I always wanted to be in stock to recommend to people. Like I always want a Jillian Tamaki book on hand, and I always want a Ben Passmore book to point to. And classics like Maus, Fun Home and Persepolis that folks are always looking for.
It came up repeatedly when Fun Home The Musical was playing at the Gate Theatre over the summer. We couldn't keep that book in stock. We still can't keep it in stock. I desperately wanted to collaborate with The Gate during the Fun Home run, but despite multiple attempts to message them we couldn't make contact. It was a real bummer, like what are the odds of there being an indie comic shop and DCAF and Fun Home The Musical all a few minutes from each other and we couldn't collaborate.
My family's personally hectic summer means I couldn't even attend the musical, which I'd been looking forward to all year, which was just an extra disappointment during a rollercoaster 2nd half of the year.
Balancing the list of Best Sellers with the list of New Releases and harder to find books was about keeping the shop well rounded, so a parent doesn't ask where all my Picture Books went, while I shrug and say "sorry, I needed to buy two dozen copies of Monica this week." This year demand finally forced me to loosen my "no serials" rule to stocking. With Amulet and Heartstopper coming to an end in 2024 more and more requests are coming in for serials so I needed to stock more serials. It's difficult, because you play whack-a-mole keeping a series in stock but you never have the volume a customer wants.
The simple solution would be to "stock what sells," but this is where the increase in demand met the limits of my buying budget. By the end of 2023 I could sell any number of anything. I was pushing my orders to 80+ books a week and I was still dozens if not hundreds of books shy of what I could actually sell if I had it. I didn't need 1 copy of Joe Sacco's Palestine, I needed 25 copies. And there were so many books like that this year. There was a huge demand for some comics and all I could do was drip feed 1 or 2 copies a week of all of these different books, that then sold immediately and I had to wait another week or two for the next copy.
I did feel like that by late autumn I really got a handle on keeping all the various genres full. There was a time in past years where I'd neglect a particular genre until it disappeared off the shelves.
A welcome addition to the online shop was Shopify finally updating to give customers the option to only view "in stock" books. Which was our most requested change and until this latest shop update was hidden behind a paywall we couldn't afford. For the first time it also gives me a quick glance view of my total stock. In general Little Deer always has almost 1000 items in stock and almost 2000 out of stock.
I've said before, that I could spend €10,000 without blinking on comic stock. I've got lists of books I want to stock and restock a mile long.
Add in things that Are Not Comics and I could probably spend €25,000 without blinking.
NOT COMICS
I brought some things into the shop this year that Were Not Comics and it was pretty successful? I've always had a Wait These Aren't Comics section, but some buying opportunities came up this year that allowed me to expand on that.
I had contacted Editions Sulo a year before to become a stockist for their lovely jigsaw puzzles, and they finally reached the distributing capacity to get back to me! It's great fun to support other small businesses with my small business. There's more of these kind of things I want to stock in 2024 if budgets allow.
Based on common customer requests I realized my postcard/greeting card section was lacking so I tried to beef that up before Christmas.
And on a Halloween Whim (followed by a Christmas Whim) I tried my hand at Vinyl LP's and WOW it turns out folks love records. It's a lot more difficult to price CD/DVD/Blu-ray/Vinyl, they're more expensive than books and incur a customs fee that books are exempt from, but I think because Ireland is an island economy that has to import everything people are very forgiving of prices. I always knew when I made the mistake of pricing something too low (accidentally undercutting myself and selling at a loss) because things sold the instant I listed them.
But since Not Comics aren't the focus of Little Deer, I don't need to be aggressive with my prices. And I'm only stocking things I'd want myself anyway. If I was way off on the whole record idea and no one wanted a Totoro soundtrack, I'd take it home myself and listen to it.
And it turns out, like some of the comics I stock, I happened to be the only place on the island with some records? There's so much unmet demand in Ireland, it's crazy.
TAKE HOME
Buying more stock helped Little Deer grow, but I personally wasn’t taking home much more money than the year before and we still haven't replenished our savings which were wiped out by starting the business in 2021 and moving the business twice in 2022.
Add to that some unrelated personal finance problems (sometimes the non-Little Deer parts of my life require money, who knew!), and familial health issues in the second half of 2023 and I really felt the lack of buffer.
So Little Deer is a bigger business now than it used to be but we’re still walking the tightrope without a safety net. Which is foolish. It would have been wiser to slow down the growth and end the year with money in the bank.
Instead I've been spending the week between Christmas and New Years still paying off 2023 debts (and I'm still working on it).
RENT-O-METER
This was kind of a silly idea that got a lot of attention? It felt weird that our most popular social media posts were about struggling to make rent, but I guess that's an Algorithm Problem that we can't control. Once I introduced the Rent-O-Meter, it was hard to go a month without mentioning it. When we didn't mention that rent was coming up, sales kinda dipped, or dwindled. It was a funny dynamic!
But like showing people our electricity bills and our Dublin City Council rates bill, or the disaster that was our flood, being transparent in our business costs seems to help our business. Showing people my face also makes difference now that Instagram holds your audience hostage until you include a photo of a human in your feed. Humiliating!
A funny side effect of the Rent-O-Meter popularity is that artists who wanted their books stocked at Little Deer would contact me based on a viral Rent-O-Meter post, which ironically and unfortunately is when I don't have any money to buy their books.
In response to The Flood, I added a donate button to the website and people have been incredibly generous. We're very fortunate and very grateful to have customers that alongside buying books also give when they can to support Little Deer. It gives me hope that there may be a fundraising future if we ever need to take a big financial leap.
WHERE TO NEXT?
Especially since 2024 is the end of our 57 Manor Place lease! Will they let us stay? We don’t know. The landlord doesn’t respond when I ask what their plan is come November 2024. Maybe they don't have a plan yet. They have planning permission to redevelop the building, but maybe they’ll delay again (like they did when I moved back in in 2022). But I think planning permission lasts 5 years and I believe they were granted this planning permission in 2021 (during our first pop-up) so the clock is ticking.
It would be a dream to buy the building but (going by its 2021 sale price of 300k) that would require 100k+ in cash before the bank will even talk to me about a commercial loan.
So between now and November 2024 I need a safety net to cover any potential moving costs that might come if we can’t extend our lease.
If we need to move, there is so so little available retail to rent. Lots of empty buildings in Stoneybatter, Smithfield and Phibsborough, but a lot of unserious asking prices and landlords so rich they’re happy to leave their buildings vacant for years and decades (or sell on the building to someone else who will leave it empty until they sell it off to someone else who will leave it empty…)
In November I absolutely got suckered into a meeting with a local “mom & pop” landlord, who heard I was looking and came to me to show me a retail space he was considering bringing back on the market (after 15+ years vacant!!). But it turns out the retail space was derelict, not vacant, and he was not really looking to give a small business a home but fishing for info on local rent prices so he could up his asking price.
As frustrating as that meeting was, I still want to say if anyone has any contacts with anyone who owns a building (like if you're renting an apartment that's above a vacant retail space - I'm looking at you, Chili Shack!) please let me know! DM, email littledeercomics@gmail.com, come by the shop, whatever! Notice a new For Sale or For Lease sign during your morning commute? Snap a photo and let us know!
I obsessively check Daft, and I still regularly bother our landlord (a realtor) about a live/work property they were selling in 2021 that we attempted to buy before we opened in Maureen's but it didn't work out (it's still unsold, still vacant, going derelict!)
Property was central to a lot of Little Deer’s challenges this year. The shop flooded, twice. My landlord couldn't be bothered. We had to deal with pests, mould, rising damp shorting out the electricity, a phantom smell that seemed to travel up and down between multiple buildings on Manor Place for two months?
You might wonder why would I dream of buying a building with so many problems, but part of it would be to actually invest in the building and maintain it. We’re in a very expensive short term lease. I’ve told the landlord if the rent was lower and the lease longer I would pay to repair and renovate the building. But he isn’t interested. They’re very happy to get their 20k a year from me for a space that almost fell into total dereliction when they left it vacant for 10 months in 2022 (our brief relocation to Inchicore)
PRIDE OF PLACE
2023 felt so long that it's hard to believe that at the beginning of the year the shop was still painted grey and only had half has many bookshelves as it does now!
We did so much to improve the shop! We painted the facade! Gabriela came back and did her gorgeous sign painting! Which gets us international attention, even if the audience is too far away to buy our books.
The Grangegorman Educate Together moved buildings and gave away all their bookshelves and desks and chairs, of which we took several (and could have taken even more!)
A lot of this beautification was for the Stoneybatter Festival, which was like hosting a fifth DCAF in the year but totally in and around the shop? It all came together last minute but our activity tents were packed and the shop was decimated!
It was the first time I really experienced the total chaos of a shop rush, books getting knocked over left and right, having to shoo away kids who were trying to climb the shelves to reach the Sex and Erotica sections. Madness.
BEYOND OUR CONTROL
While things like the shop flooding were only partially within our control (we have to keep cleaning out the upstairs neighbours' cigarette butts from our drain before every big rain!) there were some things in the second half of this year that were well beyond our control.
UPS shuffled their staff over the summer. And the two drivers that knew Little Deer and knew I picked up the kids from school midday, and knew they could leave my boxes with anyone, or even swing by my house while I was feeding the kids lunch, they were transferred to other routes.
And whenever they came through Dublin 7 picking up extra shifts I had to tell them how much I missed them.
From summer onward UPS was so short staffed that sometimes our boxes would sit in their depot for a week (the depot is in Finglas, so only 15-20 minutes away, if you think, "why don't you just go collect the boxes yourself, matt" it's because they don't actually know where the boxes are in their system, the one time I spent my day off driving to Finglas to get them, they didn't know they'd actually loaded the boxes onto a truck, so while I was in Finglas my boxes were on a truck driving past the shop).
There was a rotation of new drivers (and freelance delivery guys UPS was farming out work to?) who kept missing me midday. Who didn't know they could leave my boxes with a neighbour, or who thought 57 Manor Street was the same address as 57 Manor Place and would leave my boxes outside the door to Joli cafe?
I spent all of autumn explaining to every new driver our hours and where they could leave the boxes for us, and it's all mostly sorted out now. Hopefully the same driver we met in November and December and who knows us now is still with them come January.
The UPS issues came to a head in early December, when I was trying to place my last orders of the year, and 4 boxes (100 books, 1/10th of my total stock) after a week of delays got delivered to a neighbour with no notice to myself or UPS's tracking system and UPS couldn't find the boxes or knew which driver had delivered them and no one knew where the books were until my neighbour finally stopped by and said "oh here you go."
That particular UPS disaster came at the heels of the Dublin Race Riots and a freezing two-week cold snap. No one wanted to buy books. And who could blame them. Then when things finally started to thaw, we couldn't get any books for more than a week.
On my sales graph for the year, Little Deer grows almost every month of 2023 until December. Following the trajectory of the rest of the year, December should have been a hit. We should have been able to pay off debts and start saving. But sales just went cold for 3 weeks. And then the last 3 weeks of the year were just us clawing our way back to 2022's numbers.
TRYING NEW THINGS
Kate and Kat have done wonderful things with workshops and activities at Little Deer this year. Zine making, figure drawing, still life, sketch club, comic jam, it's a full dance card!
We're still working out the audience side of things. We'll get requests for an event, but then tickets don't sell whatever reason (money, scheduling, our social media posts buried in the algorithm), so we have to cancel the event due to low turnout, followed then by fresh requests to host an event.
We're trying to get over that hump in 2024 by advertising more. Going to print some flyers and put them up around town, newsletters, whatever we can do to let people know what's happening in the shop.
For a brief period I was trying to buy a used projector and screen to facilitate workshops with a video/computer aspect but couldn't justify the purchase price.
I managed to nab an old free B&W photocopier over the summer but it wasn't a goer for zine making. I guess it's RISO or bust. I gave it up for more bookshelves when we couldn't get any traction with it.
Bluesky has been good for us despite the comparatively tiny audience there. Often more people see our posts there than Twitter or Instagram! What a novel idea for social media! Showing your followers your posts.
Our international reach has grown. Folks are choosing to visit Little Deer during their visits to Ireland (and even making stops in Dublin before/after UK visits!), artists are coming by and bringing me comics to stock. Which is amazing, because getting books to Ireland from across the water is always a challenge.
Little Deer got mentioned in several newspapers this year, both good and bad (being included in a list of trendy shops and restaurants to entice people to pay more than a half-million for an old terrace house, while we struggle to pay rent) but it means people are more aware of us now.
We still get customers who live a stone's throw from Little Deer who only just found us for the first time, so we still have a lot more people to reach.
HOUR CHANGE
With the kids getting older, school pickup times have moved on from 13:30 to 14:30. I've left Little Deer's public open hours as 10-1 & 3-5 because sometimes I need to run some messages but most days I'm in the shop an extra hour each day. It's improved our sales (obviously we make more money open than closed!) but definitely leaves me more rushed on the housework I used to do during that midday break.
That rushing doesn't help my perpetual lateness opening the shop. I know customers don't appreciate it, but Little Deer needs to be flexible. If the shop becomes some rigid imposition on the rest of our lives it'll fall apart. So sometimes I'm late and a customer is inconvenienced. All I can do is apologize and open the shop. We aren't a big shop with a full staff and long hours. We may never be! We can only do what we can.
The shop growing and getting busier and our budget fluctuating meant I had to cut out my Donut Friday excursions to Proper Order / No Messin' Bakery. A truly heartbreaking loss that often left me wondering if the cost of comic book shop success was too great.
DCAF
The Dublin Comic Arts Festival continues to grow, and sometime run up to the limits of our budget and reach. We have a big audience and community but can't seem to get many volunteers to put out posters or flyers. And we can't seem to raise much money beyond what it takes to put on an event. So our advertising and budget is a continual bottleneck.
But thanks to Debbie Jenkinson we flew over Lizzy Stewart as a guest this year! Which was a huge get. And I hope in 2024 we can afford to fly in at least one more guest if not more.
The DCAF committee continues to shoulder more of the weight, and I'm much less stressed as one of ten instead of just one. We still need to balance the load. Even with ten people, one or two end up carrying too much.
Our October event was the most attended ever! Which also brought with it our highest number of anti-masker confrontations (only 5 out of 800+) which was stressful but we gotta keep at it because we're not about to get everyone sick for wanting to sell some zines and draw with friends.
For the second year in a row I had to miss the December DCAF. This time I thought I'd figured out all the logistics to keep the shop open and attend DCAF at the same time, but yet another household bout with Covid scuttled those plans unfortunately. Once again demonstrating why we need to keep masking!
And while I wasn't together enough this year to host my own giveaway on Little Deer's opening anniversary like I did in 2022, I was at least able to contribute to DCAF's fundraiser for Palestine during the Christmas Market which was a successful experiment I hope we can repeat.
2024
Big challenge ahead is saving money for the unknown that is our November end-of-lease. Honestly, that's the main thing and everything else takes a back seat to that until we either have assurance we can stay in 57 Manor Place or we secure a new location before the end of the year.
I'll keep growing the shop little by little (might need a new bookshelf or two) but I need to hold the reins firmer and make sure I'm splitting the shop's income between savings and stock.
Thank you everyone who supported Little Deer this year! Thanks to Kate, Kat, Eli and Charlot for keeping the shop open when I couldn't (the personal rollercoaster of the 2nd half of the year meant I needed to lean on kind Guest Shopkeepers more than usual), and I look forward to selling more comics to you all in 2024!
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2023 is the first year Little Deer Comics will be open in Stoneybatter during the Stoneybatter Festival!
The festival is closing down Manor Place for events so join us out front for a day of drawing and music!
About us: Little Deer Comics is an independent comic book shop in Stoneybatter, started with the goal of expanding the self published and small press comic book presence in Dublin and hopefully grow the audience as well! We got our start as a market table in Pender's Market in 2019 and now have a retail space in the former Maureen's at 57 Manor Place beside Slice Cafe.
https://littledeercomics.ie
Twitter: @littledeercmx
Instagram: @littledeercomics
12pm-2pm: PET PORTRAITS with AARON LOSTY
Silly or serious, you decide! Aaron Losty is a cartoonist based in Ireland. His recent works include Clearwater, Ploughman, Blaze Beyond The Pale and The Last Scarecrow.
Aaron Losty: https://www.aaronlosty.com/
Twitter: @AaronLosty
Instagram: @aaronlosty
1pm - 3pm: ALL-AGES COMIC JAM with DUBLIN COMIC JAM HOST KATHERINE FOYLE! Collaborative comic making and improvised sequential storytelling. Drop-in and add your panel to the ongoing story!
Dublin Comic Jam http://dublincomicjam.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @dublincomicjam
Instagram: @dublincomicjam
1:30pm - 3:30pm: CLASSICAL / FLAMENCO GUITARIST ARASH KAZEMI! Arash Kazemi was born in 1990 in Barcelona to a Franco-Spanish mother and an Iranian father. When he was eight the family moved to Dublin, Ireland, where his talent for music soon became apparent and he began his musical education. He has developed an intriguing and unique fusion of classical / flamenco / bossa nova that has thrilled audiences throughout Ireland.
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/arashkazemi
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ArashKazemi
Web: https://www.arash kazemi.ie/
3pm - 5pm: SMALL TRANS ARTS & CRAFTS! Join the Small Trans Library for some relaxed, unguided arting and crafting in the company of queer artists. Fun and easy materials will be provided including trans poetry excerpts for collages, crayons and markers to colour comics by trans artists, and plasticine to try modelling little (trans?) creatures. Doodle, tinker, scrunch and scribble to your heart’s content.
Small Trans Library Dublin: https://smalltranslibrary.org
Twitter: @translibdub
Instagram: @translibdub
3pm - 5pm: LIVE PORTRAIT DRAWING with PHILLIP BARRETT! Philip Barrett is a comic artist, illustrator and designer originally from Co. Donegal. In 2017 Philip illustrated the Limerick-set graphic novel ‘Savage Town’ with the writer Declan Shalvey and published by Image comics. He drew the O’Brien press children's book best-seller ‘Where’s Larry?’ and its follow-up ‘Where’s Larry this time’. His illustrations and comics have appeared in publications as diverse as the Irish Times and Rabble.
Phillip Barrett: http://www.blackshapes.com
Twitter: @philip_barrett
Instagram: @ralph_bitterip
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But our stretch of Emmet Road had been mostly derelict for over a decade. Across the street was still derelict. In the minds of most Inchicore residents, that bit of Emmet Road wouldn’t be on their radar to browse on a sunny Saturday. I had wonderful neighbours on Emmet Road, Heather at FlowerPop was incredibly kind and generous and encouraging and you should definitely buy her flowers. The team at Small Changes was also very welcoming and came by to buy comics and brought me coffee, everyone was very sound. So it was a shame I couldn’t make the business match the business we had in Stoneybatter.
COMMUTER
This year was my first time having a daily commute since I left Los Angeles in 2011.
It wore me down.
In theory, my house and the shop in Inchicore were only a few kilometers away. Stoneybatter and Inchicore, with Islandbridge in between (or the Liberties if you’re going the other way) are practically neighbours.
But no buses really connect the neighbourhoods. I remember seeing plans for a circular bus line in Bus Connects, to link North Circular and South Circular. Was it cancelled? Will it ever happen? Who knows. It’s too late for me to take advantage of it, but it would have been the perfect answer for me.
Instead there’s the Luas, which takes 30-40 minutes, or walking, which takes 30-40 minutes, or cycling, which takes 15 minutes or driving, which takes 15 minutes.
The shop is open from 10-1, I need to be home for the kids getting home from school between 1:30-2:30, then I need to open the shop 3-5 and then home for dinner. Somewhere in there I also need to do post office runs and go grocery shopping. So I was zipping back and forth four times in a day.
On days when I drove or cycled, that’s an hour total commute. On days when I walked or Luas (or some combination of Luas, bus, walk, it was two hours total commute.
It was never really viable. I stopped going to any Stoneybatter shops for groceries because I wasn’t around anymore. I was perpetually late, both to open the shop and collect the kids.
Running the shop in Inchicore felt so dramatically different from Stoneybatter. Being further from home made everything harder, made everything heavier, the day felt longer.
If the sales had been amazing, maybe it would have offset the commute hardship, but sales were suffering.
STONEYBATTER
We live in Stoneybatter, so I always kept my eye on Stoneybatter and always kept my eye on the shuttered Maureen’s. No one had moved in after me. There had been no movement on construction. Throughout the year I contacted them, with repetitive questions like a small child, “what’s happening with Maureen’s, when does construction start, will you rent it out again?”
I missed an opportunity to run a pop-up in Maureen’s for the Stoneybatter Festival, and couldn’t get things together so soon after DCAF to run a booth.
But in the Autumn I finally got a response from Maureen’s, they weren’t sure if construction was moving ahead this year, they were considering renting it out again, would I be interested.
I would.
This was, hilariously, right after Gabriela finished the Inchicore sign. Rotten luck but this was our chance.
The move back to Stoneybatter was more difficult than the move to Inchicore. Less hands on deck, more books to move, absurd shelves I’d found on Adverts. It took three days.
But from the start it felt good to be home. So many people welcomed us back. Even if they didn’t buy anything they poked their head in to say they were glad to see us open again. I was reminded what foot traffic was like. The kids’ school even offered me another old bookshelf before they tossed it in a skip!
And the holiday rush, which didn’t seem like it was going to happen in Inchicore, happened in Stoneybatter.
November and most of December we were still in recovery-mode from the move. And then in the last week before Christmas we finally matched our 2021 sales. A real nail biter.
TAXES
I pity my accountants. I’m an American living in Ireland, so I need to file taxes in both countries. I make very little money but lots of money travels through me. DCAF doesn’t make me money but happens on my books, Little Deer doesn’t really make money but has lots of turnover, teaching before the pandemic, odd freelance animation and illustration. It’s a nightmare of paperwork with so little to show for it.
But 2021 was the first time Little Deer had a retail space, so I got to see what retail money is like.
A more experienced business person would know how their business is doing year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day.
But I am more like a small baby that hasn’t developed object permanence yet. Seeing Little Deer’s taxes was like seeing the business for the first time.
We were basically break even in our first four months of retail. It made a profit, technically.
Not impressive but not bad for our first months in retail.
I was simultaneously encouraged and discouraged by this news. On one side, we weren’t losing money! Yay!
We don’t have enough resources to really run a business that loses money. We’ve already put our savings into it and we would exhaust our family and friends very swiftly if we had to lean on them (more than we already do).
And frankly, if I’m going to lean on friends and family for help, I’d rather do it for a retail property I would own, not a rental where the building owner would rather redevelop and move in a cafe beside another cafe.
So not losing money is good.
We’re also not really making any.
It feels a bit shit to disrupt our family’s life so much for so little return. There are a lot of days when business is slow where I feel like I’d be better use to our household doing laundry, washing dishes and cooking dinner. It feels terrible knowing the kids want to go to the playground but I need to open the shop for no customers instead.
But a friend who is way more experienced in entrepreneurship than I am said not losing money was a victory worth celebrating and that we’re still in a pandemic with a cost of living crisis so as long as the business is ticking over and we’re making rent and not losing money, there’s a lot of value for doing that for 2-3 years. It would give us a good picture of the long term viability of the business. So onward we go.
BARBER LOCO & THE BUTCHERS
Before Maureen’s came back up for rent, Barber Loco on Prussia Street came up for rent, same rent as Inchicore but right around the corner from our house in a tiny messy space.
I was all ready to move in when the realtor went cold. And I found out more than a week later they decided to go with someone else.
The someone else they went with proceeded to then fall through for them and they offered me Barber Loco the day after I moved in Maureen’s. What are you going to do. Barber Loco would have been snug and closer still to our house and the post office but with no neighbours to drive traffic.
At the start of this Christmas break, the former butchers beside Tesco offered me their space, a space I had attempted to get pre-Maureen’s. The reason I hadn’t gotten it before was that it was missing a front door, which I didn’t think was ideal, and couldn’t find a builder to install a front door. But they’ve since renovated and now they’ve got a front door. A funny space in a Tesco shopping centre but I’m glad to see it’s being actively rented after so many years vacant and can’t wait to see who moves in.
THE DUBLIN COMIC ARTS FESTIVAL
Our last event was Christmas 2019. We had run the DCAF Artists Fund for more than 2 years and raised and redistributed €5000. And now DCAF was back.
We couldn’t do 4 events in the year. At first we were only going to do 2 events, bookend the summer with May and September. But demand was so high that during the September event we went ahead and booked a 3rd even in December.
DCAF is now twice as big as it was before. Before the pandemic, we would only have a single 2-day event in December, and it was a bit of a stretch, with maybe half the exhibitors tabling both days.
Now every DCAF event was a 2-day event, with almost an entirely new lineup both days. We passed 100 exhibitors for the first time in December.
This year was the first year we got to try out the new DCAF Committee. We’re working out the kinks, going from an event mostly organized by myself to now 10 people. Some jobs I’m able to delegate, some I need to do myself, some jobs I can’t do at all anymore.
DCAF was started when I was a stay-at-home dad, mainly because I could do most of the organizing on my phone while babies napped.
Similarly, the Little Deer retail experiment started when DCAF was on pandemic hiatus.
Now the kids are no longer babies, Little Deer is my full time job and DCAF is twice as big as it was before! Everything really collided this year.
We skirted by on the May and September DCAF events, but stretching to the December event nearly broke me. Not enough time to prepare, everyone pulled in different directions, Little Deer unable to close in the run-up to Christmas. It was the first DCAF event that I couldn’t attend myself since I founded it in 2017.
But it happened, and the committee took care of it, and it was a success, but I was burnt out, and so were some committee members. So we’re working on how to get through the 4 DCAF events in 2023 with less stress.
For the May and September DCAF, we brought almost the entire shop. This was ridiculous and excessive but I didn’t know how else to do it.
For the December DCAF, since I wasn’t able to close the Stoneybatter shop, I needed to split the stock in a way where customers coming to either DCAF or Stoneybatter wouldn’t miss out on books.
Not being able to close the Stoneybatter shop also meant leaning too much on Kate to run the Little Deer table at DCAF. We’re trying to make sure that is a once-off mistake. The 2023 DCAF Winter Market will be a week earlier and hopefully I’ll be able to close or we can plan better between myself, Damhnait and the kids that one of us can be in the shop while I’m at DCAF.
DCAF published a book in 2022! Thanks to DCAF committee member Clara Dudley, DCAF received its first Arts Council funding! We’ve never successfully managed to secure funding for events but she was able to get money for publishing a comics anthology. That was part of the breakneck run-up to the December DCAF, the HOME anthology was going to print and being delivered to Little Deer the day before its launch at DCAF. Over 100 copies sold so far and we haven’t even had time to distribute copies to bookstores other than Little Deer. It's been a wild success for the committee. Something that wouldn't have been possible if I had still been trying to run things on my own.
VIRAL
Correlation is not causation, but Kat basically saved Little Deer’s holiday season with one viral tweet.
Maybe not viral like a celebrity social media post, but easily the largest reach Little Deer’s ever had. With so many kind testimonials as people talked about the shop.
7 days before we closed for the year, we were thousands of euros off the previous year’s sales. And while Kat was Guest Shopkeeping, I said they were welcome to tell people that.
I’m not one to play my cards close to the chest. I try to be transparent about DCAF and Little Deer. Because it’s nice if people know that a shop they like might close forever before it actually closes forever. And if talking about the business encourages other folks to start more events and more businesses, that’s great. I subscribe to the rising-tide-lifts-all-ships philosophy.
If our business had stopped that 7 days before Christmas, we likely would still plow forward, but we wouldn’t have made January rent. And the slow business was already effecting our ability to order books.
Kat said kind words, Kate said kind words, more people replied with more kind words. It was very encouraging as I was burnt out from DCAF and looking at sad sales numbers to close out the year.
It was right up to the wire but in the end we matched last year’s sales and covered January rent.
It’s not the broad Christmas-season-safety-net that more successful businesses use to weather the rest of the year, but I’ll take it.
STOCK
Trying to learn my lessons from January 2022 as I go into 2023, a repeated mistake I made throughout the year was: whenever Little Deer would sell a lot of books, I would immediately feel the compulsion to buy loads of books to replenish stock. It happened after DCAF events, it happened after the 2021 Christmas season.
It basically meant while Little Deer was continually stocking up, we never accrued any savings and I’ve been flying without a net all year.
So I’m trying to force myself to take a more measured approach to restocking instead of my usual panic-restocking.
Hopefully dialing back the oh-no-the-shelves-are-empty restocking will also give me a chance to spend more money on the smallest publishers and self publishers. And spend money on things I’ve wanted to do since Little Deer opened: more local artists, more cards, prints and gifts, notebooks, art supplies, chocolates, etc.
Building a bit of savings would also help me with school & library sales. A few times in 2022, I had to turn down libraries who wanted to buy comics & manga through Little Deer, simply because I didn’t have enough money on hand to order the books. If an individual requested a very expensive book (like that €400+ Love & Rockets box set) I could maybe request they pay in advance for such a huge outlay. But a school or library pays via invoice after the books are delivered. So I need money on hand to purchase the books. And some library orders were so big I couldn’t afford the purchasing costs and had to turn them down. They’ll find another shop (or Amazon) to order their books, but it was frustrating be unable to make that business connection.
We had some drama around our sales of Peow Studio books this year. We are such a small shop and our buying budget is so low, a few hundred a week. So when we extend ourselves to order in hard-to-find books, we can’t order enough to satisfy both domestic demand and international demand. We need to prioritize domestic demand.
This came to a head with Peow’s A Frog in Fall by Linnea Sterte. We backed the kickstarter. Books arrived, and before I understood what was happening, international sales had cleared us out in 24 hours. This was doubly difficult because Peow was still fulfilling the kickstarter. More books wouldn’t be available to retail stores via the usual wholesale avenues for months. When you take into account the high cost of international postage (which then resulted in cancelled orders when international customers realized you couldn’t get a giant book off the island of Ireland for less than €30 postage) it was a whole mess.
It was at this point that I figured out how to block international orders on certain stock, which I immediately did for all remaining Peow books. It was the only way I could guarantee any books for customers in Ireland. That then led to emails and DM’s from international customers the rest of the year wondering why the webshop was blocking their orders and could I please send them the books.
I’m not sure if international demand will ever be that high for books again, but at least now I know how to cut things off if I need to.
Customers are also bumping up against the limits of Shopify’s UI and Little Deer’s limited stock. We try to carry an enormous variety of books, but since we can only afford 1-2 copies generally (more for popular new releases) the online shop is full of sold out products which make browsing difficult. I don’t want all these books to disappear from the shop, because I often reorder them and I want customers to see what’s possible to request, but at the same time I need to find a way to “downgrade” out of stock items in the webshop browsing so they come up last.
DRAWING, READING
One advantage of the summer sales slump is that I was able to finish penciling my graphic novel, Chocolat Noir.
https://nongravity.gumroad.com/l/chocolatnoirsketch?layout=profile
I still haven’t figured out how to draw the final book, in a way that I can transport to the shop and fits in my backpack. Autumn into winter was so hectic that didn’t have time to work on it anymore.
I got a little better about reading short comics and zines this year, but still finding it difficult setting aside time to read larger graphic novels. I need to, to make better recommendations to folks, but DCAF and running the shop and other things kept pulling my attention.
2023
This coming year is hopefully the year we give Maureen’s a makeover. The landlord removed her old sign (and gave it to her I believe) and I’m working with Gabriela to design a new facade.
Our holiday season was saved, but not so much that we can tell Gabriela to spare no expense. I’ll probably end up needing to paint the facade myself and only bring in Gabriela for the lettering.
There’s also the interior to contend with.
I’m forever amazed by new businesses’ budgets to renovate their retail spaces. We basically started Little Deer with enough money to buy some shelves from the salvage yard and cover first month’s rent and deposit. The idea of being able to spend thousands of euros on walls, floors and lighting is a dream.
Hopefully I can figure out a way to spruce up the adverts.ie hanging shelves and paint the shop without spending too much.
LITTLE DEER PRESS
Last year I mentioned how a lot of people asked if Little Deer would be publishing books and how the business would need to be way more successful than it is to try something like that.
Publishing remains a long term goal and dream though. A dream that maybe seemed more possible at the start of 2022 than the end of 2022.
Seeing small press publishers shutter over the last few years have left me even more determined to publish books someday, even if just to selfishly get back out-of-print books that I’ve wanted to stock in Little Deer.
THANKS
Thanks to our customers in Stoneybatter and Inchicore and our mail order customers all over Ireland and a few regular customers living abroad for keeping Little Deer afloat.
Thanks to Kate and Kat for keeping the shop doors open when I’m not able to.
Thanks to Charlot for being our Thought Bubble liaison this year. Traveling to buy stock for Little Deer is something I want to do eventually, but we don’t have the budget for travel. Cheekily asking a friend to buy books for us worked out really well in the meantime!
Kat brought The Comics Jam to the Inchicore shop, which was wonderful and Kat and Kate ran a workshop in the Stoneybatter shop which is very exciting and will hopefully lead to more things in 2023.
My anxiety around groups is too high for hosting, so I’m really happy that they’re taking the lead.
It’s possible Little Deer might run tables at some events besides DCAF in 2023. We’ve got a second card reader now that would allow us to split up the shop when needed.
There’s also the Fun Home musical coming to the Gate Theatre in 2023 which we’re excited about and want to figure out how we can join forces.
Here’s to Little Deer continuing to tick over and stay out of debt and maybe grow a bit in the new year.
Here are some random thoughts from Little Deer’s first four months of retail, some lessons learned, for folks who are curious about the behind-the-curtain stuff and are maybe interested in attempting retail themselves someday:
There’s a lot I’ve enjoyed about running Little Deer but I need to mention rent first because it’s the main obstacle to Little Deer ever turning a healthy profit and the main obstacle to Little Deer continuing to exist at all.
RENT
Rent is expensive. Like really really expensive. I talk to businesses that have been open for a few years and find out I’m paying almost double what they’re paying (in one instance my rent was 4x higher). I read a small business article that recommended rent for retail be only 5-10% of your gross income, which is hilarious, currently it’s 30-40% of our gross income, which puts a big pinch on our stock budget and profit. Like housing, retail rent is now chasing after the speculative land-value of the property, which is wholly disconnected to the normal business of incomings and outgoings and footfall and advertising and take home pay and all the rest, so now I need to sell enough comics to compete with international land speculative gambling.
The fact that this pandemic crisis, even more devastating than the 2008 crash, has resulted in prices everywhere, commercial and residential, SKYROCKETING, is soul destroying. Both individually and societally. There’s the old “keep *wherever* weird” slogan, I first heard it in Portland and then Santa Fe, but lots of art cities and towns have adopted it. It translates directly to “keep rent low.” You can’t have an artistic, fun, weird, dynamic city or town or neighbourhood with out-of-control property prices. It’s not even about a Starbucks moving in anymore, it’s about nothing moving in. Landlords will convert retail to residential, stealing away already sparse communal space from a neighbourhood. White collar workers looking for newly sought after work-from-home space will convert retail into a home-office or extra living room. Solicitors and Realtors will purchase retail space as essentially billboard advertising, even as Dublin hemorrhages office space. And worst of all, nothing needs to move in. A building can be bought, left to rot, and then resold a year or two later for an obscene profit. See the Pigeon Motel on Manor Street. Probably sold for around 350k a few years ago and either when it finally crumbles or whenever the buyer decides, will likely sell for 600k+ now. There’s no leverage to negotiate cheaper rents anymore.
A shop in Los Angeles called Meltdown Comics went out of business about a decade ago. In their going-out-of-business letter they said “if you don’t own your building, you don’t own your business.” As an aspiring entrepreneur those words haunted me. For a long time I thought I’d never attempt Little Deer until we could safely buy a retail space. Basically on hold forever unless we won a Prize Bond. But the realities of running a business out of our teeny tiny house in the middle of a pandemic with work-from-home and on and off lockdowns, meant that we had to move Little Deer out of our house.
My main inspiration for Little Deer was a used-book/record/dvd shop in the Malasaña neighbourhood of Madrid and is the model for cheap rent allowing for spontaneity and creativity. A very small, empty retail space opened one day with a handwritten note saying “buy/sell/trade” and a milk crate in the middle of the floor with a few books and records in it. Every week we walked past this shop and watched it grow and blossom. The milk crate moved on top of a folding table, bookshelves were added (likely as he could find them on the curbside). And by the time we left Madrid for Ireland it was a bustling used shop full of books and records and movies. All started from a milk crate and cheap rent.
MAIL ORDER
Some quirks that came and went over the four months is the wild variability of mail-order. What was remarkably consistent before opening became so chaotic that I stopped factoring mail order into my income at all for the entire month of October! It had evaporated almost entirely and didn’t pick up again until Christmas.
There was an initial wave of mail order when I announced my pop-up with Maureen’s that made our first week maybe my biggest sale week of the year. The drop off after opening the shop was so dramatic I thought maybe the website was down (and there had been at least one website glitch in the first month, but overall it was simply because people stopped ordering through the website). I understood the philosophy behind it. Lots of people all over Ireland make trips to Dublin a few times a year. So instead of ordering a book from Little Deer, the pop-up became a destination for one of their few visits. It’s a lot of fun to browse in a bookstore, that’s why I wanted to start Little Deer. It just meant my mail order statistics for the previous year were meaningless once I opened the shop, it meant I was flying without instruments for a while with no reliable income estimates, basically no clue how much I’d make for several months.
SUM-UP
In the month before the pop-up at Maureen’s opened, Sum-Up pulled the plug on their webshop service, turning it into a very crap, bare bones replacement. At first, this was just a tiresome nuisance, having to spend over a month manually porting over the incompatible Sum-Up website to Shopify. But the sudden availability of Maureen’s turned the tiresome nuisance into a high alert panic stations as I was telling this landlord I had a successful webshop (file not found) and opening a shop brought such a influx of visitors that I quickly needed to finish transferring the webshop so I could let them at it and get to work on the physical shop.
SCALING UP
The scale of the in-store sales were also hard to fathom when I was running the online shop. What used to be a good month in online sales became a good day in retail sales. The amount of books I was ordering every month became the amount of books I was ordering several times a week. But the excitement of that scale up quickly wore off once I factored in the zero-overhead of running a mail-order business out of our house versus the enormous-overhead of running a retail business in Stoneybatter. Surprisingly my take-home pay, our profit, hardly went up at all. There was a noticeable bump for the holidays but my previous mail-order income was about the same as my current retail income, despite the massive scale up and tons more work. If my only goal with Little Deer was to make money, there would be no point in continuing, as it was much easier to make the same amount of money selling books out of our house.
The variety of books we’ve brought into the shop has been exciting though. We almost quintupled our offerings from the start of 2021!
The funniest bit of sales for the year were from Peow Studio. Little Deer has always been so small that I would only order 1 copy of whatever book. Maybe 5-10 copies if it was an imported zine. I always prioritized variety because we’re too small to stock loads of every book. But the mad rush on Peow Studio books lead to our first orders of 10-20 copies of a book! And selling out fast! And when Peow started selling out world-wide, our international orders were exhausting! I’m still not sure if I’m handling international orders properly but it’s the only way I can figure it out for now.
By Christmas I had made buying 3-5 copies of some books part of my regular routine. Which I’m still kind of shocked by even though it’s still very small by normal bookstore standards.
The kiddos section threatened to swallow the entire shop at some point. I kind of have a vague rule about only stocking books related to comics, so not ALL picture books, just picture books by comic artists or kids comics. But even with that limitation, the madness of the first few months made it feel like I was running two shops at once, a picture-book-store and an indie comic shop. And as much as I’ve scaled up the kids section since September I could probably double it or triple it easily, to meet demand.
STOCK
We had a small bit of savings to start Little Deer with, but to run smoothly and stress free, we would have needed to have had at least double that amount. We went for it anyway because we needed to move Little Deer out of the house and Maureen’s was available, but we’ve been on the back foot the entire time when it comes to stock, both enticing people with a wide variety and keeping books in stock.
If you’ve followed Little Deer for the last year, you’ve probably noticed that however many books we have on the webshop, there’s only half that are ever in stock at any given moment. We just can’t afford to keep everything in stock all at once. There’s space in Maureen’s for at least 2x as much stock as we have, we just don’t have the funds.
Playing whack-a-mole with restocking is still a game I’m figuring out. When I moved into the shop in September, I only had the amount of stock that we could fit in a corner of our house. Which looked piddly in the 25 square meters of Maureen’s. After the surge of sales connected with our grand opening, I spent too much money in October restocking, which led to using our savings to cover rent that month. Since then I’ve been a bit more cautious in restocking, especially towards the end of the month, but it’s difficult against the steady stream of customer requests to hold back ordering books until we’re sure rent is secure.
I’ve got a pretty good system now though of restocking strong at the start of the month and then stocking up less and less until rent is secure and then starting over again.
There was a brief period, at the end of September, where I thought I could include a lot more gifts in the shop, more local artist prints, cards, postcards, notebooks, pens, art supplies, chocolate, candy, gift wrap… but those ideas were quickly scuttled when we didn’t make rent in October.
Notebooks and art supplies would have been great to have around Christmas, but we couldn’t pull money away from book orders. Physical gift cards also would have been handy, and Shopify offers them, but they’re expensive to order and we would have had to order them in October, when our financial future was very uncertain.
One thing that happened when we didn’t make rent in October though was that it made me realize that Little Deer might not last beyond this 6 month lease, so I basically had fun with my distributor and looked up all my friends who’ve been published and ordered their books (and CDs). Poets, bakers, craftmakers, scholars, musicians, anyone I knew that my distributor had a lead on I ordered, just for fun. It didn’t matter if it sold, I miss a lot of friends since I left America so it was nice to carry all their hard work in the shop.
CUSTOMS
The new EU customs law that went into effect in July really injured Little Deer and our desire to keep our stock fresh and unique with comic imports from all over the world. We had boxes of books returned to sender, lost for months before reappearing back in America. We got slammed repeatedly with new import charges, both Brexit-related and otherwise.
I don’t know where the new EU customs law came from or what problems it was trying to address, but it’s been brutal. It’s easier now (and sometimes cheaper) to get on a plane and go pickup a comic from England or North America than it is to import it.
And even artists and companies doing their level best will still have packages held at customs for typos or goodness knows what else. In one case, despite the package being obviously labeled books and all our details being correct, I had to jump through hoops with DPD customs until their customs person said “oh this is for books? nevermind we’ll send them all through now.” Why was it flagged? Why the weeks of hold-up? I’ll never know!
DAYS OFF
We learned the hard way at the end of September, that basically until the kids are older, when they’re off school, Little Deer has to shut. I attempted bringing them into the shop for a few days in a row and kinda killed the whole idea of the shop for them for months they were so bored and annoyed with being cooped up in the back room.
It’s a little different now that I’ve got a little roster of Guest Shopkeepers, but I certainly don’t want the kids hating comics and bookshops so basically if no one can cover the shop it’s better to close the shop than to torture the kids dragging them to the shop with me.
As a result, November ended up being the only month of our first four months that Little Deer was open for the entire month. We didn’t open until the 2nd week of September, in October we closed the week the kids were off school for midterms, and Christmas we got hit both with a Covid isolation the first week and then closed for from the 21st for holidays.
I guess it means we’re doing okay if that many closures in such a short amount of time hasn’t tanked us.
We do get told quite a lot by customers that they missed us or that we were closed, either due to our many closures or due to them coming during the extended lunch break where I need to collect the kids from school. I’m not sure what to do with that. Not everyone’s annoyed when they tell me that, but I guess very few shops in the city centre are primarily owner-operated, so folks don’t bump into inconvenient closures very often.
COVID
I have no clue what the next year of the pandemic has in store for Little Deer. Obviously we’ve two kids in school and schools are a continuous super-spreader-event, so if we get another positive case the shop will need to close again.
Our closure the first week of December lost us thousands of euro. Of which I’m only really entitled to maybe one €350 dole payment, and I’m not even sure of that since I’m still jumping through hoops a month later to get it.
To comply with Covid safety precautions, we’ve been leaving the doors and windows open for ventilation along with giving away free masks. I’m grateful I haven’t encountered any extreme anti-maskers, only some absent minded poorly masked folks and lots of parents who still don’t think masking kids or even teenagers is necessary.
There’s a chain reaction a lot of folks don’t think about, it’s not just about Covid, the only ways schools could stay open the last few months was by sending any kid with a sniffle or a cough home. So really any common cold will end up keeping my kids home from school and potentially shuttering Little Deer.
It’s all very precarious and stressful.
And cold.
Leaving the doors and window open in September was kinda nice, and then got increasingly less nice in October and November and December. Damhnait bought me several wool jumpers for Christmas and even with them and the new radiator and a hot water bottle my fingers are turning blue towards the end of the day. It takes some of the joy out of sitting in a comic book shop if you can’t draw or read because you’re shivering so much.
WELL READ
It’s funny to run a comic shop and have such little time to read comics. I need to continuously remind myself to pickup a book now and then and read it so I know what I’m recommending to customers. I used to do it all the time at markets in the early days of Little Deer because there’s lots of downtime at markets, but there’s a lot more busywork in running a shop that makes me forget to take the time to read. The year and a half that Little Deer ran mail order out of our house, the books were always boxed up in a corner of our house, so for a long time I couldn’t read anything.
MY COMICS
At the same time I need to carve out time to read comics, I need to carve a little time to make them. I had a few good drawing days in the early months but once it got cold I gave up. It’s fine, I’m currently at an impasse with a scene that annoys me anyway, but once I break that scene I’ll need to carve out more time to draw.
My first comic, Strong sold out this year. I want to see about a second printing, maybe something RISO’d through Damn Fine Print. Having seen a much bigger variety of printed comics this year I’m curious to try a different size than A5. I’m really fond of kuš’ A6 comics.
I’ve got so many more printing opinions than I used to! A lot of them informed by the fact that the covid-ventilation-requirements essentially means Little Deer is an “outdoor” bookshop, as far as climate control goes. I’m constantly battling curling pages.
LIGHTHOUSE
I (foolishly?) attempted one event at the Lighthouse cinema, bringing all the queer comics out of the shop and over to a screening of the new No Straight Lines documentary.
I had a lovely time but what I hadn’t realized, was that even though Little Deer started as a market stall, the shop had grown so much even in that first month, that it was no longer convenient or easy to breakdown and transport so many books for a market.
Maybe if I had a bookmobile or a book bike or a book cart? Something I could leave set up in the shop and wheel out to markets, maybe? Before the pandemic began, I was trying to build a bookshelf that would become a book cart, but abandoned the wheeled aspect when the virus struck. It’s still something I’d like to figure out, because I’d love to be able to easily get from Little Deer to DCAF four times a year whenever the events restart.
At the moment though, it’s probably too much for me to attempt the shop and markets at the same time.
GUEST SHOPKEEPERS & MURAL
Probably the most positive aspect of Little Deer has been the opportunity to get more artists paid and increase the amount of art in our neighbourhood. I never actually pictured having anyone else run the shop when we started but the sudden opportunity to visit my parents for the first time since the pandemic started really opened the door to the possibility. Followed by the strain that a 6-day week put on our household, being able to hand over Sundays to Kate for a few months was a relief. I’ve really enjoyed seeing what the Guest Shopkeepers do with the recommendations and the social media for the day. Knowing I could toss the keys to Kate, Katherine & Charlot when I needed to saved me a lot of stress.
When the weather got cold I was really ashamed asking other people to be in that cold shop all day, but walking around the neighbourhood shops, almost all of which have their doors and windows open to, I guess that’s just the terrible reality of retail right now.
The mural and sign painting is something I’ve wanted to do for so long. DCAF never had the budget for street art or window painting, and it’s not like Little Deer had the budget either, but I really wanted it to happen and Gabriela was brilliant and we were so lucky to get her and it was so much fun seeing more of her murals pop up all over the neighbourhood afterwards. The postcards and greeting cards of the mural were a lark. I hope they sell out so we can do more.
LITTLE DEER PRESS (HA!)
From our first week opening, people asked if we would start publishing comics ourselves. This kinda ties back to the obscenities of rent. Because if I was paying any reasonable amount on rent, I might already be publishing some mini comics. But at our current rent, we’d have to be at least 3x more successful than we are before we could begin to think of taking on any additional risk.
THE FUTURE
My lease is up at Maureen’s in February. So I’ve 2 months to figure out what comes next. I might be able to renegotiate to stick around a bit longer depending on how the landlord’s plan to redevelop is going.
There’s very few places available in the area, and all the prices are even more expensive than the very expensive Maureen’s.
So I’ve got some ideas:
Plan A: win a Prize Bond and buy a building!
Plan B: extend my lease at Maureen’s another 6 months or a year.
Plan C: stay at Maureen’s month to month until the owners start their renovation, as stressful as that sounds.
Plan D: some other retail space (there is so little available, please send me any leads!)
Plan E: rent a cheap as possible office space and move Little Deer to mail order-only until something better comes along.
Plan F: buy a van or a truck and make a Little Deer booktruck and do mail-order-only and book truck browsing until a better retail comes along.
Plan Z: move Little Deer back into our home.
THANKS
Thank you everyone who has supported Little Deer since 2019 and thank you everyone coming to our pop-up in Maureen’s and sharing our social media posts and spreading the word about us. Thanks to all our mail order customers all around Ireland.
We’ve such a small audience but I really appreciate how excited and enthusiastic everyone has been. We’ve had such a warm welcome.
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