GARDEN CENTER, BOTANICAL BAKERY, BARBER AND BOOKSTORE – THE EVOLUTION OF A FAMILY BUSINESS
BY ANNIE HOUSTON
Annie Houston is the matriarch of Birdsall, but she will be the first to underline the fact that her garden boutique is a collaborative effort. We invited her to sit down and share with us the evolution of her beautifully curated and inviting space.
Birdsall has added a few new shops to the boutique. Tell us more!
I could exploit the angle of the business planning, market research and development, but it wouldn’t be genuine. As a mother-daughter team, Morgan and I believe in fate and trusting our instincts for a lot of professional decisions. Success is often associated with recognizing an opportunity and seizing it at the right time. It may seem too adventurous and spontaneous for non-entrepreneurs, but we’re used to functioning on faith in our abilities to make it happen and risk-taking engenders addictive positive rewards. A friendship from the University of Denver, and a passion for baking lead to the opening of the Botanical Bakery of Denver in Birdsall. We had experienced firsthand how customers enjoyed spending time in the store with friends, wandering around the plants and sitting on the outdoor furniture to catch up. What better fit than to offer them more room to relax or read a book, while eating delicious pastries? The original concept of Birdsall was to invite the community to have a respite from work and chores, surrounded by pleasant sounds, smells and biophilic elements. The addition of a barber shop may seem random, but Sky the Barber is an artist, just like Dylah the Baker. The Coyote Bite barber is a brilliant addition to our micro incubator of women-owned businesses. We didn’t plan it that way. It evolved organically and collaboratively. Birdsall has had many requests from micro-businesses to be enveloped into our store, but quality and artistry is an absolute pre-requisite. The new floral shop/bookstore, Petals and Pages, attracts another set of customers looking for the complete retail experience that is so diametrically opposed to a shopping mall. The Urban Nursery, is a perfect solution for our customers looking for outdoor plants, a variety of annuals, perennials and small shrubs not readily available in big-box stores. Our horticultural advice is complimentary and we apologize if we get carried away with the design of the plantings!
Tell about Jean Rosset and how you became a lover of nature.
Jean Rosset is my Dad. A long-time vegetable gardener in his native France, he inculcated the love of gardening as soon as I could walk. I remember to this day the smell of fresh tilled soil, the long afternoons dedicated to bring potatoes into the cellar, pruning grapevines, attaching long rows of tomato plants with shredded sheets (no scarring of the branches), and so many more memories. He planted based on the moon cycles and we lived each season to the fullest. Spring was for picking dandelions in the fields for salad, June was dessert eaten directly in the cherry trees, Summer is green beans harvest, Fall is walking through the vineyards to find the grapes forgotten by the pickers the best kind, replete with sun and sugar, Winter definitely for gathering holly and mistletoe for the holidays. To my child’s eyes a Dad had to know how to plant. In my twenties I married a landscape architect and our second date was planting a rock garden! Gardening was not a hobby; it was a lifestyle. We didn’t hike for pleasure, instead, we crisscrossed the Alps to discover edelweiss flowers, mushrooms in the forests, and snails after a rain (yes, we ate them). Hedgehogs came out of the wood pile with their new family, crows were domesticated with the leftover food from lunch, and foxes inquisitively visited at dusk. Sparrows lining the electric lines means winter was around the corner.
What is a family business like, on a day-to-day basis?
It’s a lifestyle. You don’t leave business at work and you enjoy the lively brain-storming conversations after hours. So many small businesses are family-owned and if you’re raised in that environment, it’s challenging to envision working for a large corporation. The day-to-day is a constant adrenaline boost and solutions are negotiated over a quick cup of coffee, a glass of wine at home, or through texts in the evenings. Work anecdotes and stories get shared at the dinner table. The common passion can become a common obsession with ideas floating while on vacation which is often conducive to innovations. It’s important to define exactly what role each family member will take on based on individual strengths and interests. Our unit of three, Morgan, Owen and myself are blessed with having different abilities that complement each other, eliminating frictions and simplifies our jobs. There is little overlap and we trust the decisions we all make. We warn future teammates that disagreements may erupt between family members and it is par for the course and not to worry!
What keeps you up at night? As fellow small business owners, we figure this is a shared predicament.
A design idea for a customer. Creativity has a way of not performing while at the store, instead popping up at night, in the shower or at a red light! Esprit de l’escalier, when you wish you had said something more astute, or had written a better email. The sound of rain or the silence of snow, meaning the store will have fewer customers that day. The alarm when somebody didn’t lock the doors properly. Once you’re awake, you immediately start responding to work emails. Doesn’t everybody? Besides payroll, vendor issues, freight rates, the economy, the news, the grocery list, dinner menus, dogs barking, hail on the garden, staff scheduling, future workshops, planning for the next season… The goal is to fall asleep before the brain starts whirling and reading a business book usually does the trick.
What challenges do small retail businesses face?
The challenges are enormous and not for the faint of heart. Besides the economic ups-and-downs which is a constant reminder to pivot on a moment’s notice and always have a plan of action for a potential severe downturn. Our wholesale costs have grown exponentially and reduced our margins in order to stay affordable. Shipping and freight charges have exploded during the pandemic and show very little signs of coming down in the near future. We consider ourselves lucky not to have personnel issues, as it is a concern for small businesses who cannot compete with the benefits afforded by the large companies. Access to capital funding is another hurdle for small businesses. The Colorado Enterprise Fund is a fantastic source for local entrepreneurs needing loans that major financial institutions wouldn’t consider. Online behemoths are a major competition. Consumers have been conditioned to order products online expecting immediate deliveries to their doorsteps. There’s a lot of education required for customers looking for higher quality pieces. We’ve all become very impatient with our purchasing habits, but nothing competes with a human advocating for your needs and interests.
Where do you find inspiration?
Inspiration comes when you least expect it. Adventure traveling is the best resource for me. Broadening one’s perspective with new foods, art, music, culture, architecture, landscapes, is completely re-energizing and triggers creativity. The Majorelle Garden in Marrakesh inspired me to include more color in the hardscape, the skills of Nicaragua potters made me discover the beauty of texture, the fountains of France and Italy are always inspiring, the pots hanging from a Cuban balcony stressed that quantity is not always better, the Allerton and McBryde gardens of Kauai perfected the use of tropical plants around water features, and of course all the botanical gardens of the entire planet are pure inspiration-inducing. Chanticleer Garden in Pennsylvania is heavenly. I once was advised by a catholic priest in Saint Peter, Rome, as I stood mesmerized by the stained glass, at 15, to take one more step forward. I did, and all of a sudden, everything changed, from the shadows, to the architecture surrounding me. It was a teaching moment I will always remember. Take one more step and see everything anew.
What can we expect from you in the future?
We’re constantly searching for additions to our product lines. We work closely with the artistic director of our fountains manufacturer, Campania International, to bring new designs to them, based on the feedback of our customers. It’s extremely satisfying to flip the pages of the new catalog and discover the fountains we dreamed of. It’s important to us to inspire our customers with products that will enhance their outdoor spaces. Our latest discovery is a stone carver from Santa Fe who sources rocks from Arizona or New Mexico and transforms them into unique water features. My favorite is the petrified wood fountain at 225 million years old. Our zinc fountains come all the way from Hungary and are exclusive to Birdsall. In order to simplify our customers’ life, we are bringing all deliveries and services in-house. This is the time of year to plan the Holiday season and we’re organizing the services of designing and planting winter containers on site for homeowners. I’m dreaming in fresh evergreen branches, birch poles, red twig dogwood, fairy lights and bobbles!
All of this magic happens at 2870 S. Broadway. See you there!