Welcome to Let’s Talk Business, where Square business owners share their stories, the biggest lessons they learned, and their plans for the future.
Today we’re talking to Randy Fulk (@rtfulk), who owns Korie’s Kloset with his wife, Tammy. They started their children’s clothing company in 1985, focusing on quality, dependability, customer service, and uniqueness. Their home base is in Florida, but they operate a completely mobile business, traveling and selling their custom clothes at state fairs from the East Coast to the Midwest. Randy shares how they handle the logistics of a traveling business, his best tips to optimize fair booths, how they build trust with customers, and more.
Watch the 40-minute video interview and read some highlights from our conversation.
Can you tell me more about the logistics of how the business operates on the go?
"Right now we’re on a five-month road trip, where the shortest fair we do is 10 days, and the longest is 24 days. At each fair we have two or three days to get set up. We unload, set the booth up, sell, tear it down, and move to the next one. It’s just like setting up a brick-and-mortar store every week. You just get used to it and learn to make shortcuts and try to make stuff easier. We have an 18-foot trailer we drive to each state, and we try to carry enough inventory to be set up and prepared for each show. My wife handles all the logistics of getting inventory waiting for us at each location. We import it with a six- to eight-day delivery time, so she has to stage everything out so that it’ll be there when we get there. Then we work on getting it tagged, priced, and put out."
How do you make your booth as attractive as possible to bring folks in?
"We try to make it like a mini store, like we’ve been established, which gives people more confidence in us. We put flooring down, because it’s soft and people are walking on asphalt and cement all day long. We get more compliments on the flooring than anything. We have Edison lights strung across to make sure everything is well-lit. Our clothes are colorful and draw attention. Customers send us photos of their kids wearing our clothes, and we have three TVs up in our booth with all the pictures. People like to come in and see their kids, and new customers come by and they see that these are our customers. It gets attention and brings new customers into the family.
"We try to have it where people can come inside and take their time. You see a lot of the pitch people barking, “Step right up!” We don’t do any of that. We invite them in, thank them for coming in, ask them how they’re doing, and if they need any help to give us a call. Then we just let them casually shop and not be pressured into anything. We find that works because people like to just look. They don’t like to have someone on top of them all the time, telling them about this and that, and feel pressured to buy."
How else do you build trust with potential customers when you’re a mobile business?
"You’ve got to make them feel relaxed and, you know, they can trust you. That’s why we have our QR codes all over everything. They can always get in touch with us because people always worry about what happens after you leave. We give them every way to contact us just to give them the assurance that we’re here to take care of them after the fair. So that makes a lot of people comfortable. That’s how we’ve built our year-after-year customers. They’ve met us and know if there’s ever a problem, we take care of it 100%. It takes a while to develop a customer, and when you lose a customer, you never get them back. So we always try to take care of the customer to make sure that they’ll come back."
What are you thinking about with the business moving forward?
"We turned 60 this year, and so we’re hoping we’ve got ten more years in us. We hope after five more years we’re going to start cutting some of the fairs out and start slowing down. We were looking forward to retiring until COVID hit and the fairs were shut down and we were out of business. We knew right then we didn’t want to retire any time soon, because it got boring just sitting around the house all day long. As long as I can go, I’m going to keep doing it. All of our family live in North Carolina, and we’re in Florida, so we don’t see them that much anyway. So being away from home is not really that bad, because there’s really no one there. We love traveling. We love being on the road. I wish it could go on forever really, to be honest with you."
Watch: Let’s Talk Business with Randy Fulk
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Aylon Pesso is the Square Small Business Evangelist, helping sellers run their businesses better. Based in the U.S., he is a former small-business owner, consultant, and Square seller.
This article is only for informational purposes. The information provided in this article solely reflects the speakers’ views and are not endorsed by Square. This article is limited in scope and is only intended as a high-level overview of the topics mentioned.