May 4, 2007

Strength in numbers

By EDWARD D. MURPHY, Staff Writer Portland Press Herald

http://business.mainetoday.com

Portland Buy Local members, including Charlie Grunden, center, assist Nancy Lawrence in her store's move Sunday. "It was the most incredible thing you've ever seen," said Lawrence, owner of Portmanteau on Free Street.

Portland Buy Local was launched last year as an effort to offer tangible -- meaning monetary -- support for businesses based in the city.

Local businesses were supposed to try to buy from other locally owned businesses, and consumers were encouraged to consider a local company instead of a chain when making buying decisions.

In the 10 months that the campaign has been under way, however, the group's definition of "support" has broadened.

When Nancy Lawrence was moving her Portmanteau store a few blocks Sunday, she didn't call a moving company -- she called others in the Buy Local effort, and they moved her store's smaller items across Temple Street, from Middle Street to Free Street, hand-to-hand, bucket-brigade style.

"It was the most incredible thing you've ever seen. We had 50 people," Lawrence said as she settled into her new location this week. "It felt very much like the early days in the Old Port, when it felt like a cooperative neighborhood business group."

Buy Local bumper stickers can be seen on cars, and businesses that are involved sport a decal in their windows. But one of the most successful aspects of the effort isn't something visible, said Mary Allen Lindemann, owner of Coffee by Design and one of the founders of Portland Buy Local.

"It's amazing to me how we all stay connected and really want to try to see if we can help each other -- not only to stay in business and survive, but to stay in business and be true to the core values of our businesses," Lindemann said.

The intellectual, administrative and even emotional support that members of such a group offer to each other usually isn't anticipated, said Stacy Mitchell, a Portland resident who wrote "Big Box Swindle" about the impact of large chain stores and is also senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

"What independent businesses are discovering is that they are not only independent, they're also interdependent," Mitchell said. "They're getting to know one another and offer other kinds of support that is not necessarily financial, but very important."

Mitchell said the networking benefits in support of a buy-local campaign pays off not only in shared business expertise, but also from strengthening a city's businesses as a community, something that often disappears as companies are swallowed up by larger, out-of-state firms.

"This is another web of personal connections from business to business. There's a lot of social benefit to that," she said, noting that with larger companies, few transactions are handled face to face. "A sense of camaraderie is really worth a lot."

Lindemann discovered that when her business was looking for a new system for tracking sales. One of her wholesale customers had the same system Coffee by Design was considering and allowed her and a few employees to check it out -- despite the fact that the look would, by necessity, open up some of the company's private financial data.

Businesses can help each other on a wide range of issues, Lindemann said, such as tips on how to find employees or how to understand a particular financial challenge.

Lawrence said the extra hands who turned out for her move were largely business owners who rent space near her shop. She said that getting a chance to meet them, to talk and to learn about their businesses means it will be easier for her to point customers in the right direction if they're looking for something her clothing and accessories store doesn't carry.

Lindemann said the relationships are strengthening to the point that it feels like a tight-knit neighborhood rather than a collection of businesses.

"Literally, if I need a cup of sugar, I can go next door and get a cup of sugar," she said, "if it's locally owned."

 

© 2007 Press Herald

 

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