Retailer: Gourmet Way
Location: Hayden, Idaho
Founded: 1998
Square footage: 2,800 sq. ft.
Tiffani Roesler went shopping for a commercial kitchen and ended up with a kitchenware store. A personal trainer and avid cook and caterer, Roesler found her store, Gourmet Way, when a catering client tipped her off to the store’s kitchen space. “I was looking for a big kitchen and the store had one, but it had all this retail area in front,” she jokes about her foray into the business. She bought the store in March 2015.
And the shift into retail from personal training? “It is much more time intensive than people realize,” Roesler says. “My boyfriend thinks that products just show up at the door. But in this industry there are so many products and vendors, and the landscape of cooking and food is constantly changing,” she says, noting her store’s tagline is “A Place for Foodies.” “You have to go to the shows and keep your eyes open to keep up.”
Roesler lists shopping for key items as the most challenging part of her role as a retailer and has put friends and family to work scanning popular television shows and magazines for new kitchenware ideas. “I have my mother watching Oprah and Dr. Oz, looking for new products that people might want to buy here,” she says. “We want to make sure we have the right things at the right time.”
Being about an hour from the nearest Williams-Sonoma, also gives her store an advantage. “There are few places to find truly gourmet items around here,” she adds, dismissing a nearby Bed Bath & Beyond as a “retail beast that is not hands on,” in terms of customer service.
Gourmet Way also had a longtime history with the Hayden, Idaho area. Founded in 1998 in nearby Lewiston, the 2,800-sq. ft. store changed hands twice and moved once before Roesler took over.
Her first challenge, she says, was to get the word out that the store moved from its prior location a few towns away, even though that move was five years ago. “I still have customers who come in who were former customers who thought the store had disappeared,” Roesler says. “I have had to reintroduce the store to people.”
To that end she is in the process of developing a website and has done some direct mailings, but says her cooking classes, which are taught by local chefs, have helped boost one of her most important outreach methods: word of mouth. “If you run a good cooking class, it sort of advertises itself,” she says. She will use those classes to boost the store in a promotion she is hosting in conjunction with the local library.
“We are starting a wine and book club,” Roesler says, noting that the first book to be discussed is one written, perhaps surprisingly, on Idaho wines. (It turns out the state’s wine business benefits from its border with winery-rich Washington State.)
Hosting book groups and cooking classes may be a long way from personal training, but Roesler says she loves it. Especially her interactions with customers. “We have long conversations about making the perfect creme brûlée,” she says. “It is all about doing your job well.”
