I was recently drawn to the story of Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia opening a retail dancewear store out of their location. They spent $150,000 renovating a space that used to contain two offices into a street level store space. The director of the school noted most dancewear stores stock up to $150,000 in pointe shoes alone and they haven’t reached that level of stock quite yet.
Business Insider had an interesting video in December about the London based pointe shoe maker that supplies the NYC Ballet and the staff at the ballet that maintains the stock.
Rock School made the decision to open the store based on success they have had selling to their own internal constituencies and the fact that a number of longstanding dancewear stores had closed. Those stores had not only supplied the dance community, but also the intricately costumed participants of Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade.
They saw an opportunity to diversify their revenue stream in what they anticipate to be increasingly challenging financial times.
“There’s this perfect storm of already having a successful boutique, seeing the need in Philadelphia, and the potential for a new revenue stream to enable us to do our good work,” he said.
[…]
As a nonprofit, the goal is not to make money, but to cover expenses including maintenance of the buildings. It can be a struggle, says Stark.
“We are anticipating that struggle could get more challenging with what we’re seeing in some of the proposed changes on a federal level,” he said. “We want to be ahead of that, and we don’t want to wait until there’s a problem. We want to proactively step forward and have a solution so that we can keep doing our good work.”
[…]
“Really we’re trying to monetize our asset to support our mission and to support the scholarship and the outreach programming that we do,” he said.
