Retail operation capitalizes on gifts, decreases music and book inventory

When Lowe’s wanted to expand its footprint, the home improvement store asked The Master’s Parable Christian Store to consider moving. It took some time, but the Parable member store did change locations, landing in a former grocery store that is part of a 60,000-square-foot building. 

Several investors who believed in the ministry of the Clovis, N.M., store bought the large building, made some improvements and asked Master’s to be an anchor store. Along with owner Tammy Garner’s Parable franchise, part of the building is owned by Big Lots and part by another of Garner’s businesses, a coffee shop called Java Loft. 

“I’d always wanted a coffee shop with the bookstore,” she told Christian Retailing, “but I really didn’t want it to be within the bookstore because I know me and cutting corners, because I didn’t want someone who was a barista that had a dirty apron to feel like they had to go over to the Bible counter and sell.”

The nearly 10,000-square-foot location Master’s Parable occupies includes a 5,500-square-foot sales floor and a 1,200-square-foot conference room to use or rent out to the community.

Garner sells real estate full time now to help supplement the store’s ministry. This year she’s had to depend on her staff to run the store for the most part, but is still aware of what’s happening there.

Making it her store’s mission to provide “a haven of Christ’s love for our customers and our community,” Garner told the staff in a recent meeting: “When you open our double front doors in the morning, I want there to be a vacuum. What’s going to draw people in? Is it our customer service? Is it our marketing? Is it our products? And I think it’s got to be all of it.”

Garner also doesn’t want anyone in the community feeling left out in the cold.

“At a Christian store, you don’t want to isolate anyone,” she said, recognizing that in lowering price points so much through the years, they may have lost some more affluent customers. “We’ve actually isolated a part of our demographic that can and do buy the more expensive [items] and we didn’t have it for them to buy, and so it’s hard to be all things to all people.”

But in the area of jewelry, “that is something we’re going to try to do,” she said. “We want to have all price points for that. Now when we say all price points, we’re not going to be like the local diamond jewelry store.”

With moderately high-priced jewelry from Spirit and Truth, it has been “very, very hard to keep the spinner full,” gift buyer Teresa Teune said.

The gift department is going gangbusters, and the store also has seen success with apparel from NOTW, Know Him and Kerusso, and personalized items sold through its P. Graham Dunn laser center, which was up for the year 58%, doubling in sales from last year. 

 “A lot of the experiments I’ve done in the store by bringing in different lines and different price points have proven to be successful across the board, from high-end to low-end,” Teune said. 

The store was soon to bring in Halle Joy items, including higher-priced handbags, as well as Fair Trade items from Exotic World Gifts.

 Decreasing the store’s music section—something Garner acknowledges should have been done long ago—and limiting books mainly to best-sellers, the store is ramping up its gift and children’s inventory, including higher-end rocking horses and a line recycled from plastic milk jugs—from trucks to teapots. The store was looking for more “wood toys and more imagination things instead of electronics,” Teune said.

The store also a number of events, including an annual pastors’ breakfast and free VeggieTales screenings. 

Its annual Master’s Ambassadors dinner for the store’s top 50 customers for the year, is a “very special dinner with lots of perks,” Garner said. “If they’re our top customers, then they’re out telling other people about us. The dinner is not only to honor them, but to make sure that each one of them is aware of what we do and what we carry.”

A special luncheon to come will cater to the top 100 female customers so the store can introduce them to some new lines it will carry.

Garner knows that in reinventing the store, they’ve got to get the word out about what’s different. 

“It’s got to be about the experience that people have when they come into our store,” she said. “Everything, from the cleanliness of the store to the customer service to the products you sell, it’s all got to create that experience.”

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