On an average school day, thousands of students bustle along the block of East 13th Avenue that leads into the mouth of the University. Seeing that potential profit walk by every day, local business owners Makyadath Lazar and his son Priyamon Makyadath decided to try for a share of the market in fall of 2006, buying the property for two side-by-side stores between The Duck Store and Espresso Roma Cafe.
It was an exciting time for the father and son; in an Emerald article published that fall, both joked about a friendly rivalry between Makyadath’s clothing boutique Origin 79 and Lazar’s campus satellite of his downtown variety store Lazar’s Bazar.
In the end, Lazar said then, “we both will win.”
Now, both stores have closed for good.
The months that have passed since they shuttered the stores gave both Lazar and Makyadath perspective on the challenges they faced, and how the young entrepreneur can continue after closing the store of his dreams.
In 2006, Makyadath, then 26, told the Emerald that he’d worked in his father’s store since he was a kid, and opening Origin 79 would be the first time they’d “gone separate on anything.”
The challenges that presented themselves soon mounted. Remodeling the old shoe workshop into a clothing boutique involved the unforeseen costs in time and money of chipping away years of grime and replacing old drywall.
Also, Lazar said, the high-end fashions were “not the right product(s)” and were by-and-large “too much for the students.” Makyadath said he initially suspected that the less than $50 products would move the quickest, but instead his hottest product was the $120 denim, which he had stocked little of as an afterthought.
It was difficult to stock more of those because national brands move fast nationally, Makyadath said, and when he was ordering more, so were many other buyers, creating too much demand for too little supply.
“Things I had a lot of faith in” didn’t sell, he said. That denim also taught him that “if you know exactly what your customers are going to buy, you’re going to run a great business.” But customers’ desires are hard to predict, even with years of experience. Makyadath has been the buyer for Lazar’s Shoe-A-Holic store on Willamette Street for eight years, and this past weekend the store hummed with customers. He learned there to “buy smaller, but wiser,” and the size of Origin 79 forced him to apply that lesson exponentially. The boutique’s facade is a mere 11 feet long and the interior is 300 square feet.
For contrast, Lazar’s downtown variety store is 3,200 square feet. As far as Lazar’s campus store, which sold stickers, cigarettes and other miscellaneous items (what his son calls ‘randomonia’) the similar size he had was simply not enough.
In addition to space concerns, the college market is fickle, Makyadath said. There is little parking, and although the foot-traffic is “insane” on East 13th Avenue, most students have “tunnel vision” walking from one place to another and are not interested in shopping. And four months out of the year, there’s no school in session, hence, fewer customers. Having two other clothing stores nearby, American Apparel and West Moon, the latter of which has since closed, didn’t help.
But a big – maybe the biggest – challenge for Makyadath was deciding to realize the way things were going and close up shop. “It’s difficult to cut the part of being a business person and having feelings about what you’re doing,” he said. A first business “is like a kid,” Makyadath said. “You want it to do a certain thing,” but it ends up going its own way.
In the end, Makyadath made his choice. While he wasn’t losing money, he wasn’t making it either. When he couldn’t make payroll for the store’s three employees he had to let them go and work all the hours himself while also working full time at Shoe-A-Holic.
“It was a tough time,” he said. One night “dad and I sat down, we looked at it for what we had spent and what we were getting out of it. It just didn’t make sense to keep going forward with it.”
Lazar spread his store into the Origin 79 space after it closed in spring 2007, but it was clear by the end of that his products were simply “not what the people wanted.” Lazar’s store closed last December.
At the end of 2007, Makyadath was in an entirely different place than he’d previously imagined. “You have a vision of what you’ll be doing in a year and that be completely different (after) one night.”
Instead of running his own profitable business, he’s planning on leasing the vacant space to someone else.
Which, evidently, won’t be a challenge. They’ve had to take down the ‘for lease’ sign because they’ve had so many calls. In the coming seasons, those desolate store fronts could be brightened by a tanning salon or a tattoo parlor and while no deal has been signed, one appears likely to come.
For Makyadath, now 28 and with new perspective, he looks back on the choices he made between the hopeful opening and painful closing of his dream store as “a great learning experience.”
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